There have been a few blogs
posted so far about how much of an impact big data analysis could have on the healthcare
industry but the impact just isn’t happening.
In this blog I am going to present you with a few of the reasons that
the healthcare industry is falling behind when it comes to big data analytics.
Until recently the healthcare
industry was mostly done by paper. You may not think so but go to your local doctor’s
office and most likely you will still see shelves full of patient files. While
paper files are a good back up this limits how fast information is updated in
the computer and makes using big data analytics difficult to process. Many
doctors are starting to go electronic which is already making noticeable improvements
but there is still a large amount of patient data in paper form.
There has been a push to
implement an Electronic Health Record know as EHR in order to have all of this
patient data in an electronic format. While this is improving data collection
it is also hindering analyzing the data. While data is being collected around 43
percent of healthcare organizations have reported they haven’t been able to improve
patient care based on the data collected. This is one of those garbage in gives
you garbage out type scenarios. It doesn’t matter how good your analysis is if
you are analyzing the wrong data. The only way to correct this is to start
gathering more data from the customers and make sure it is entered
electronically.
Another problem that has been encountered
is there is a major formatting problem between different organizations. While this
isn’t just a problem in the healthcare industry, it does seem to impact it
more. The difference in data is okay on an independent doctor looking as his
data but the problem comes in when a much larger study is done because
different data is being collected and it is in a different format for each
doctors office. I believe the responsibility of fixing this issue is at a national
level and regulations should be in place as to what formats should be
used. This would fix a large amount of
the issues.
This could also be corrected
with EHR as well since it doesn’t force the user into a certain format. This
lack of structure almost makes the data useless because most of the tools used
to analyze big data need the data to be in a certain format. The only way Big
data is going to be successful in the healthcare industry is the current IT and
EHR issues will need to be resolved and implemented in not just most locations
but in all healthcare facilities no matter how big or small they may be.
As pointed out in some of the
earlier healthcare related blogs from this class, big data analysis could
result in huge improvements in this industry. While it may take a while to
implement the necessary changes, I still believe that we will see improvements
being made in our level of healthcare service. While only approximately 34 percent of EHR
users have reported being able to make an improvement in the care they provide
that is at least a start in the right direction.
“How
EHR adoption is hindering healthcare big data, analytics”
“[REPORT]
iHT² Releases Big Data Research Report – Download Today”
http://ihealthtran.com/wordpress/2013/03/iht%C2%B2-releases-big-data-research-report-download-today/
This
is a link to get to a PDF of the Report
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