5 key resources to follow the development of big data in the healthcare industry.
From game-changing analytics to heavy-hitting industry players and everything in between, big data is a big deal in healthcare. As the body of medical data continues to grow, so do new avenues for analysis, patient engagement, enhanced medical treatment and cost savings. Big data stands at the crossroads, bringing these various pieces together and helping professionals in all corners of the industry make sense of a mountain of information.
It’s a fast-moving market segment with lots of moving parts. Here are five key resources to help information professionals in the healthcare field remain up to date on this important issue.
Big Names in Big Data
Information Management recently released a slideshow, Big Data in 2016: The 10 Biggest Big Data Companies by Revenue. The top 10 companies in the big data market, listed by revenue and market share, account for a total of over $7.5 billion. This represents a 33% share of the $22.6 billion market, which is projected to grow to $92.2 billion by 2026. The key players include:
- IBM: $2.1 billion, 9.3% market share
- SAP: $890 million, 3.9% market share
- Oracle: $745 million, 3.3% market share
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise: $680 million, 3.0% market share
- Palantir: $672 million, 3.0% market share
- Splunk: $644 million, 2.8% market share
- Accenture: $507 million, 2.2% market share
- Dell: $489 million, 2.2% market share
- Teradata: $432 million, 1.9% market share
- Microsoft: $396 million, 1.8% market share
Healthcare Game Changers
A recent Forbes piece, Big Data: A Game Changer in Healthcare, examines potential breakthroughs made possible by the ever-growing body of health and medical data. Moving beyond traditional collection and analysis of information about who gets sick and why, big data will facilitate new ways of thinking and learning about various aspects of healthcare, including:
- Prevention: Devices and apps to monitor fitness or chronic diseases create data that will enable researchers to examine the intersection of lifestyle and disease. Direct transmission from devices offers superior accuracy when compared to self-reported lifestyle data.
- Diagnosis: Unifying provider-generated and patient-collected data will create a rich pool of usable information. Efforts to digitize, compile and analyze data could lead to more effective diagnosis and higher likelihood of successful treatment.
- Treatment: Big data makes it possible to capture the intersection of patient data and personalized, individualized healthcare. Advanced data analysis techniques that synthesize and summarize key research could allow doctors to personalize care without spending hours digging for information, while data-sharing algorithms could identify key patterns and breakthroughs in clinical trial results.
- Follow-up Care: Big data can assist with follow-up and long-term care by predicting which patients are likely to follow their doctors’ advice, helping to prevent relapse or readmission for vulnerable patients. Apps can track medication adherence and symptoms. Even robotics may incorporate big data to enhance monitoring and care.
Healthcare Big Data Growth Areas
HealthITAnalytics looks at key trends and growth areas to identify areas of interest to healthcare stakeholders, compiling various reports and predictions from the healthcare sector. The piece identifies a number of topics to watch for 2016:
- Personalized medicine
- Expansion of the Internet of Things, including healthcare-specific IoT
- Clinically-focused analytics
- Growth among EHR vendors
- Intuitive, interoperable interfaces for use in precision medicine, population health management, chronic disease care
- Cloud analytics
- Text analytics
- Patient engagement technologies
- Predictive analytics tools
Big Data’s Impact on Healthcare Providers
Becker’s Spine Review identifies five ways big data is expected to affect healthcare providers in 2016:
- The volume of health data is expected to grow dramatically over the next several years.
- Reimbursement models are shifting toward pay-for-performance, leading to increased emphasis on big data tools, infrastructure and applications for healthcare organizations.
- Physicians and clinicians can use health data to treat patients more effectively and incorporate individualized care.
- Big data analytics can save the US healthcare system $300 billion per year, with high-level savings possible for clinical operations and R&D segments as well.
- Enhanced data and analytics can yield major results in patient care, monitoring and decision-making, resource analysis and utilization, and patient self-management.
IT Trends in Big Data
For a more IT-heavy look at the big data picture, Tableau offers a free, downloadable white paper, Top 8 Trends in Big Data for 2016. The report examines big data as a whole, including issues and developments of relevance to healthcare. The key trends named in the report are:
- NoSQL technologies, unstructured data, and schema-less database concepts are becoming increasingly important and influencing database systems and vendors.
- Apache Spark is becoming the big data platform of choice.
- Hadoop projects continue to mature, and many companies plan to deploy Hadoop in 2016.
- Increasing investment in components surrounding enterprise systems, such as security, enhance enterprise standards and eliminate barriers to enterprise adoption.
- Options expand to add speed to Hadoop, as users seek fast data exploration capabilities.
- Self-service data preparation tools are growing in popularity. Users seek faster, simpler solutions for dealing with data of various types and formats.
- Data warehouse growth is expanding in the cloud as users shift to on-demand, cloud-based technologies.
- Cloud and data companies are coming together with Internet of Things services, creating a convergence of several key big data trends.
Conclusion
Big data is a global game-changer in all industries, and healthcare is no exception. This dynamic segment of the healthcare market affects stakeholders in every capacity, from healthcare providers to venture capitalists. We will continue to monitor key trends and developments in this arena to help life science information, competitive intelligence and regulatory professionals remain up to date and fully informed.
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