With so much talk about Big Data today, it’s easy to forget that it continues to be a disruptive, revolutionizing force in healthcare. Technologists keep finding new ways to extract data from unlikely sources – videos, sensors, images, text documents – which data scientists then use to create more sophisticated models and discover new insights.
Smart healthcare groups today are leveraging these advances to solve key challenges throughout the organization:
Optimizing Patient Outcomes
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Big Data is having a huge impact on clinical research as a whole, allowing investigators to mine patient data from around the globe as they look for cures to cancer, diseases, viruses and more. However, individual providers can also use analytics to study the factors involved in hospital-acquired conditions within their own population. This will help reduce the number of post-op infections, determine which device types (catheters, stents, implants) are more successful, find ways to limit the spread of infectious disease and more.
Implementing Workflow Improvements
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Today’s healthcare providers are going beyond scheduling data to find ways to increase staff productivity, limit costs and reduce patient wait times. They’re analyzing every piece of data across the organization – information from the mobile devices physicians carry as they move from patient to patient, the sensors embedded in monitoring devices, dispensary applications, lab equipment, even surveillance footage – to see where improvements can be made.
Optimizing Cost and Reimbursement Models
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In 2013 alone, hospitals were underpaid for medical services by $51 billion. Clearly, healthcare providers need to break down the barriers between siloed data stores in order to analyze all the factors that impact care – including revisits and testing protocols – to determine true cost of service. Being able to map that information to payer reimbursements rules will help organizations find a way to reduce growing financial deficits.
Pioneering Preventative Medicine
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From wearables for tracking daily wellness habits to genetic testing for understanding predisposal to specific conditions, smart providers are using a wealth of individual and public data to create personalized medical plans to keep their patients healthier over the long run.
Boosting Patient and Community Engagement
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Extending care delivery throughout the community means offering services and facilities tailored to an area’s unique requirements. Whether an organization is looking to grow through acquisition or expansion, planning teams need deep knowledge on population, health factors, care preferences and more. Mining patient information alongside public health and social media data will allow healthcare organizations to keep pace with evolving patient and community trends.
It takes a powerful yet flexible data storage and analytics architecture to continuously capitalize on the advances occurring in Big Data today. At American Digital, we start by optimizing structured data sets and increasing efficiency with next-gen storage technology such as HPE 3PAR. To help companies dig deeper and speed results, our analysts and data scientists rely on HPE’s purpose-built analytics platform equipped with natural language processing and machine learning to draw real-time insights from all available information sources – internal and external, structured and unstructured.
Becoming data driven is one of the best strategies for ensuring relevance in today’s evolving healthcare space. Let us know, in