The Explosion of Big Data in HealthCare.
The Explosion of Big Data in HealthCare.
By Carlos Kühl Nogueira, Group and Managing Director, InterSystems- Latin America
Every day, users around the world generate around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, and this is will continue to grow as more people go online and the number of connected devices boom.
By 2017, it has been estimated that global traffic from mobile devices alone will climb to 134 exabytes a year.
All of these devices have given us new ways of doing things, from selfies to car-hailing apps like Uber. Mobile devices and the data they generate are radically reshaping our world.
Nowhere is this more true than in healthcare.
Healthcare has seen an explosion of data coming from electronic medical records, smartphones monitoring patients’ activity, real-time alerting, wearable medical devices such as Fitbits, personalized medicine leveraging genomics data, and the digitization of health records. Many more similar devices will come to market over the next few years, including contact lens that measures blood glucose, among others.
All these activities have led to a massive explosion of data, much of which will be unstructured. As a result, organizations will often find it extremely challenging to manage this information and leverage it to benefit the business.
When discussing Big Data, enterprise users often see the challenges in terms of the “three Vs” – volume, variety and velocity of data. In the healthcare sector, these challenges are magnified.
When it comes to working with Big Data in healthcare, organizations need to think about the following:
Expertise: Using Big Data in healthcare requires specialized skill sets.
Security: The privacy and security of data is especially sensitive where patient health records are concerned.
Structure: Unstructured data such as doctors’ notes and medical images do not t conform to the traditional table and column structure of relational databases.
Big Data is raw data: The challenge is to transform and analyze this information as close to real-time as possible, to draw out usable insight that can lead to an informed decision at the point of care.
Understanding how to harness Big Data and having both the right technologies and the right expertise in place will become an essential part of how any institution does business in the coming years – no matter what sector they are in.
Understanding how to harness Big Data and having both the right technologies and the right expertise in place will become an essential part of how any institution does business in the coming years – no matter what sector they are in.