People are getting more and more aware of their health, thanks to technology, which can now provide them with unlimited access to health information. More than 400,000 health apps monitor a variety of health data – blood pressure, heart rate, sleep patterns, physical activity, blood glucose, calorie intake, cholesterol levels, and several other parameters. With these surpluses of data, self-monitoring information is set to increase in order to achieve accurate data.
Technology has brought a paradigm shift as to how the Data is collected, maintained, stored, managed, and analyzed, encrypted, and visualized. This new ecosystem can improve disease prevention and increase the precision of diagnoses, provide safe meds, and make treatments more effective. Instead of one size-fit all, a patient-centric approach to medicine will be encouraged.
How Healthcare Analytics can Affect Different Stakeholders
- Healthcare practitioners: It can help healthcare professionals who are interested in clinical analytics by monitoring health, personalizing treatment, consulting remotely, and utilizing predictive health analytics for decision making.
- Government: To identify patterns and analyze trends at regional, national, or disease-specific levels in a population, the government can store unified data on patients. The government can also develop health policy, interventions, and programs for specific demographics and prepare and respond to healthcare emergencies.
- Healthcare providers: healthcare analytics can structure data to its longitudinal form, which is useful in mapping patients’ health journey from labs to hospitals, and contribute to improved healthcare outcomes.
- Pharmaceutical companies: Health analytics can be used in their various internal divisions such as R&D, sales, and marketing. Many companies are already using advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to develop drug discoveries, customer outreach, market assessment, brand intelligence, and engagement.
- Patients: Data can encourage patients to be proactive participants in the care process. They can be more in control of their health and make final decisions in contrast with the more traditional medicine approach.
Benefits of Healthcare analytics
Diseases will be discovered at an earlier onset, and thus, treatment will be quick and more effective. Doctors could predict why the treatment failed?
Researchers and physicians will be able to analyze historical Data including the length of stay, surgeries of patients, patients vulnerable to medical complications, the susceptibility of patients to antibiotic resistance, sepsis, complication rates, or any other hospital-acquired diseases. It can offer medical practitioners support in assessing and evaluating health data with algorithms while calculating clinical risk in the general population.
Patients will be able to access their data at any time and place. This will help share and impart the patient’s medical history easily to other healthcare professionals at other locations to inform or negotiate about possible medical options.
It will also lead to patient empowerment because the patient could now ask more relevant, accurate, and well-informed questions. By using technology, treatment plans could be readily adhered to. Any risk of genetic susceptibility with relatives could also be shared with others.
Challenges in Healthcare Data Analytics
Big data analytics faces significant challenges in storing data in various de-centralized data servers that are inaccessible to researchers due to data protection laws. Healthcare professionals may also oppose technological changes because of its complexity and technical know-how.
The big data mining technology will continuously grow, improve, expand, and implemented in diverse fields of medicine and healthcare to provide faster, accurate and real-time results and predictions for providers, clinicians, and patients.
