Is Big Data becoming a big threat for Medical Professionals ?

Last week , while I was talking to one of my friend who is a researcher in a very well-known national lab, we had chance to talk about the data analytics concepts.

He was telling about the future of the healthcare professionals. I remember one of his sentence is  " the good medical doctors of the future  are the good data analysts. It is all about correctly analyzing the data " he said.

The records(the unstructured data from the patients)  are already being extracted by the electronic medical devices. The only thing that needs to be done is to analyze the data and make the decision.

After having discussed the concept above, I have seen the article about the evolution of the data analytics about the healthcare. It made me to remember what my friend told me about the future aspect of the health care.

In the article, the collaboration of IBM, WellPoint and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center is mentioned.This collaboration is  on a project using Watson as a means to develop an oncology treatment tool. A majority of the value from Watson comes from its ability to aggregate massive amounts of medical journals. Declared a ‘clinical decision support system’, it will operate in collaboration with physicians and specialists.

The beauty of Watson, rests in its ability to analyze millions of pages of journals containing unstructured natural language data in a rapid fashion. Analytics for unstructured data is the most challenging aspect of data analysis, Big Data analytics however are beginning to solve this challenge. With the progression toward electronic medical and health records, analytics will become more practical and have added use cases.

Hospitals in control of their patient data can conduct powerful analysis through technology similar to Watson, to improve future decision making. By creating a data friendly environment within an enterprise like a hospital, data will become less of a burden and more of a resource. Having the ability to assess the past 20 years of treatment in the context of real-time patient data, will undoubtedly influence future scenarios and treatment.

One instance of practical analytics usage at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) occurred when the new IT team used analytics to highlight patients with propensity to staph infection. Staph or MRSA, is a contagious bacterium that can wreak havoc on a patient’s fragile immune system and even cause death due to infection.By conducting analytics to create a list of likely staph patients, the provider was able to specially cater to those patients in a way that prevented infection. Also applying analytics to medication procedures has the potential to drastically reduce mistakes in drug administration.

IBM stresses that their brain-child is much more than an advanced search engine. Its ability to process such massive amounts of unstructured data and provide contextual insight for decision makers puts it squarely in the territory of Big Data.

All these improvements in the  big data analytics is the sign of the change of the way that the decisions  are  made not only in the business but also in the health care environment.