A preparation to fight healthcare crisis such as COVID-19 in future
- Digitization of large data.
- Improvising quality of healthcare delivery systems.
- Integrating clinical data to assist clinical decision support systems.
- Big Data has the potential to improve patient care and save lives at a lower cost.
- Identify challenges and offer systematic solutions.
Indeed, the current situation of the COVID-19 pandemic has identified new-age technologies to fight and bring in some sanity during this time. And this brings back to limelight the fundamental concepts around these new-age technologies such as Big Data.
The power of Big Data to proactively identify meaningful information well in advance and thereby assist in adequate planning as well as preempting any potential threat further, assumes significance in situations such as those prevailing presently due to COVID-19 in general and particularly for the healthcare industry.
Digitization of healthcare data and assisting in Data Analysis:
Over the years, the healthcare sector has generated a lot of historical data through regulatory requirements, patient care and records kept in the form of prescriptions, written notes, medical imaging, insurance, pharmacies, and other administrative data which forms as a useful resource of information which can be further used to derive analytics. While most of this data currently in India has been stored in hard copy formats, the recent steps towards ‘Digitization’ of maintaining these records have been fruitful to improve the quality of the overall healthcare delivery system. IoT devices that have been innovated to capture data from Blood Pressure of every patient during time intervals of his/her visits to the hospital or a clinic for a health check-up, collates to form information on their health profiles. Such data points collected for various other checkups, combine to form Big Data on a health profile of a patient.
A massive volume of Big Data can be fruitful in assisting decision-makers, medical practitioners, overall medical and healthcare functions in disease surveillance and population health management and can prove to be beneficial for clinical decision support systems as this forms a source of information, also known as ‘Analytics’.
Platforms to collect information for Big Data:
It could be slightly more overwhelming as the data collected from the healthcare sector can be a bit more complex due to its diversity and changing healthcare scenarios with the volumes and new diseases coming up every time. In this age of Digitization, data can be pulled out from Computerized Provider Order Entry (CPOE) that offers clinical data of patient healthcare and well-being that makes up the ‘Big Data’ entirely in the healthcare industry. To overcome a health scare or a pandemic in future, the healthcare delivery system can also use data that is available through Electronic Patient Records or EPRs, social media posts such as on Twitter and Facebook or even through medical journals and news feeds.
Data Collection
In the recent pandemic of COVID-19 that has hit the world, right and meaningful data can be collected based on preventive initiatives. The right data on disease spread can be collected through various applications and techniques recently introduced across the nations globally that can prove to be beneficial in fighting this pandemic. Data that can be analyzed based on population mobility, data in reference to people being resilient to the virus can also prove to be beneficial in future to curb such a healthcare scare.
Long-term leverage of collected data:
Population mobility can be addressed with the use of telecom service providers offering information on the movement of population and effectively notifying them in case of a future epidemic or a pandemic. The data can further be fruitful in confining the disease spread within a specific area or territory. Data on vulnerable communities can also be gathered to curb them from transmitting any viral diseases. This data can further be used to allocate resources in such areas, offer funding, create a model of preventive measures in such locations and improvise infrastructures for healthcare officials to access correct information to offer treatments, issue healthcare guidelines and medicines well on time.
Advantages of Big Data in healthcare sector:
Big Data offers various advantages at decision-making level in the healthcare sector. Analytical information and data patterns that are available on various pharmaceutical websites along with the medicines that are being manufactured to cure diseases can be beneficial in offering patient care at a lower cost in case of epidemic in future. Big Data on research in healthcare and patient care can offer resourceful information in analyzing patterns and trends, thereby offering quality care at lower costs. ‘Big Data on Patient Care’ is the most informative as it offers advanced analysis on patient profiles through predictive modeling and segmentation. This enables the decision-makers in the healthcare sector to offer preventive care, identify disease profiles, and determine preventive initiatives to offer patient care protocols that can be followed by them to get the best value for their money.
Identifying challenges and offering solutions:
The challenges that we face today revolve around data privacy which needs to be managed with steps that can secure data. A lot of personal data in terms of location, facial analysis and temperature analysis, has been taken by various governments using different technologies across the globe to curb the COVID-19 crisis. Thus, a lot of private data is being circulated. To secure this, it is important to introduce data governance mechanisms, where rules must be laid with clear guidelines to access such information and processes must be put in place so that people do not feel insecure about losing their personal data in creation of a new world.
Article Contributed by Mr. Roop Singh, Executive Director, ATCS
