Big Data in Healthcare: Definition & Future Trends

Big Data in Healthcare

If there's anything that we can all agree upon, it's the desire to be healthy. Self-help books on staying healthy are always top sellers, and healthcare is an industry worth trillions of dollars every year. However, there's also a great deal of data to analyze in healthcare.

As long as doctors have practiced medicine, they have kept track of a few statistics about their patients, from weight and heart rate to white blood cell counts and reflex times. All of this data could hold a great deal of promise. Needless to say, big data in healthcare is a huge field, and it's only going to get bigger. Let's talk about some of the possibilities that big data could offer.

Preventing Illness

Have you ever heard the old saying, ''an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?'' After all, few of us enjoy being sick; to avoid it, we eat right, wash our hands, and keep our immune systems functioning well. During the winter, many of us take extra vitamin C, for example. However, with big data, illness prevention could become even easier. We're already getting into devices we can wear like the Fitbit, Jawbone, and Samsung Gear Fit that help us with calorie counts, diet maintenance, and exercising. Progress can be updated and compared to others.

Also, wearable technologies that track our vital signs could transmit data that would be compared against the big data of the rest of the population, providing an early warning of when our functioning matches against a number of people who have recently been ill. From there, we can treat the symptoms in a much more efficient manner.

Best Practices

It's not only prevention that sees a great use from big data. Think about clinical research. So far, we only have the potential to really analyze a few particulars about each patient. With big data, that would be very different. New drugs could be created to target disease, each of which would be customized for the population that it has been tested on. Instead of only using such broad categories as weight and age as dosage guidelines, pharmacists and doctors could tailor-make each dosage to be as effective as possible without undue risks.

This can apply to treatment for epidemics as well. Cell phone data has been used to track the movements of the population in the Ebola epidemic in western Africa. This big data can be used to predict the spread of the disease and strategically plan for containment or where to place treatment centers.