Modern healthcare is driven by an outdated fee-for-service concept and service reimbursement activity. Unfortunately, the system runs little or no connection to value. And in the 21st century, the speed and scale of the challenges and demands facing the healthcare industry are unprecedented. Some analysts may even suggest that the industry is facing the “perfect storm” of challenges and variables.
But great challenges may often bring great opportunities. Cost pressures are pushing the advent of evidence-based medicine. At the same time, advances in genetics, biomedics, and computing technology are combining to enable more effective personalized medicine and treatments targeted (and tailored) to individual patient needs.
The healthcare industry is not lacking for pure data. Unfortunately, most of the data systems are leveraged for billing.
The challenge is to bring together masses of data from disparate sources and synthesize it into actionable information in real-time. But speed for speed sake in this type of healthcare analysis may be missing the point.
Actually, the ability to rapidly analyze structured and unstructured data sets is driving the real value. Unfortunately, legacy systems often block researchers
and care providers from delivering insights across multiple channels. Simply, those systems cannot analyze patient-related data in real-time and deliver it quickly to caregivers and decision makers.
But, forward looking healthcare providers are efficiently leveraging big data analytical IT platforms that link disparate pools of data within (and outside) healthcare organizations, and present the information with visualization tools that put actionable insights into the hands of caregivers and patients. The result is improved pre-analysis, preventive care, and the reduction of unnecessary procedures – focusing the care on results.
See the recent whitepaper:
http://hbr.org/hbrg-main/resources/pdfs/comm/sap/how_big_data_impacts_healthcare.pdf
