Introduction The rise of big data analytics has affected the 21st century American economy and businesses in many positive ways. One area where it is lagging, however, is the healthcare industry. For years, America has paid more for healthcare than any other country on Earth. This can be attributed to a number of reasons, but a large factor among these is the inefficiency of the current healthcare system and its failure to adapt to cost-saving analytics like other industries have. That is where big data analytics can step in and serve a great purpose. Big data is the process of taking mass amount of information across different, but interrelated areas in order to derive deeper meanings, insights, trends, and analysis through the usage of high-speed, high-capacity algorithms. This can be huge when one considers that as of 2014, there are 44 petabytes of information on patients in the electronic health records system. (Raghupathi) This can include medical history, imagery from patient scans, lab results, and a vast array of other information. Couple this information with the push to integrate individual’s social media posts, personal DNA sequencing, and vital data collected by smartphones and wearables, just to name a few, and it becomes evident that we as a species will be generating exuberant amounts of medical data. There are some people, however, who feel that having this information integrated into any kind of database poses a risk to the privacy of their most personal,
The company is a medical reimbursement company that deals with patients’ personal information from social security, to medical history and banking information. As technology in the healthcare field continues to expand, we have begun to use more big data to store all our patient personal health records and our employees’ personal records. Maintenance and processing of various and high volume data have created the “Big Data” challenge. As Gartner (2015) said: “Big Data is high-volume, -velocity and -variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing for enhanced insight and decision making” [6]. Under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountable Act (HIPAA) laws, the healthcare industry is privy and held to a very high standard to protect and keep all patients’ personal information private, safe and secured; Digitalization and accumulation large healthcare data provides great potential for healthcare data. The key to the best patient-centric, evidence-base and accountability care is delivered through big data in healthcare (Yang, Li, Wang, Chen, Wu, Wang, Pan and Mulder 2015). There are still many healthcare challenges that need to be addressed to help enhance healthcare services. With cloud computing in healthcare, the company is one step closer to lowering their operational cost and eliminating the use of hardware and software to store data. With all the company’s data stored on networks, servers and applications it makes it easier for the data to be accessible any part of the world. Some of the advantages of cloud computing includes availability, performance and load balancing (Malekabadi, Javan & Akbari 2015). When all of the company’s data is stored on the networks and computed, it is taken by Iron Mountain and stored in a remote location. With the continued growth of innovative technology cloud computing will continue to
Big data analytics is the process of analyzing large data to find useful information such as improving efficiency of business, market trends, customer’s preferences, information of competitors, and other useful business information. According to the IT Glossary, “Big Data is high-volume, high-velocity, and high-variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing for enhanced insight and decision making.” In other words, it is an abundant array of information used to acquire insights and make business decisions.
Healthcare stakeholders know how to value what they have captured and they have come up with many ideas to help with their goal. “Big data could transform the healthcare sector, but the industry must undergo fundamental changes before stakeholders can capture its full value” (Kayyali, B., Knott, D., Van Kuiken, S., 2013). Since the affordable care act has been in place there has been an increase number of patients seeking preventative care or even seeking help for chronic illnesses that they weren’t seen for because of lack of insurance. Because of that, there has been a shortage of physicians, nurses and other healthcare providers. So the stakeholders have another challenge on their hands in trying to hire more doctors and nurses to help with the increase of patients.
With the growing ability of organizations to capture and analyze large batches of data, there are ever-increasing possibilities for the development of healthcare studies utilizing Big Data’s promise of advancement in data processing. These tools can benefit the field of healthcare by treating data as an asset to be managed, as well as providing new insights into genomic development of large populations that were previously not fathomable. The health care industry is one sector of the economy where data analysis presents great opportunities for improvement in the quality of services provided, but with these possibilities come great challenges in collecting, utilizing, and education the next generation of data stewards, and the NIH is sure to look to global models for data quality in carrying out their new directive.
Worldwide use of computer technology in medicine began in the early 1950s with the rise of the computers. In 1949, Gustav Wagner established the first professional organization for informatics in Germany. Medical informatics research units began to appear during the 1970s in Poland and in the U.S. Since then the development of high-quality health informatics research, education and infrastructure has been a goal of the U.S. and the European Union. (NYU graduate training program, 2010) Changes in the healthcare environment produced fundamental shifts in the delivery of healthcare. The altering landscape of healthcare is creating a huge demand for health data analytics. The growth and maturity of healthcare informatics over the past decade has been a prime catalyst in positioning the healthcare industry for the changes posed by reform measures. By understanding the process of analytics, clinical informatics specialists say healthcare providers have the insight necessary to make the process adjustments in the future.(Riskin, 2013)
Crawford and Schultz (2014) summarized Big Data as “a generalized, imprecise term that refers to the use of large data sets in data science and predictive analytics (p. 96). The various sources of retrieving and generating information has expanded and exposed its vulnerability, especially to health data. A single breach holds risks of sharing critical information from a multitude of patients’ records. Predictive privacy harms, which are collected information that centers on individual data behaviors, have the potential to sidestep existing antidiscrimination regulations, but also lead to privacy breaches in healthcare (Crawford & Schultz, 2014). In the U.S. Supreme Court decision in United States v. Jones there were concerns expressed about invasions of privacy that could result in direct collection of large amounts of personal information through Global Position System (GPS) monitoring. This type of governmental power is vulnerable to abuse, endangerment of privacy rights of citizens, and weaken trust in the government (Crawford & Schultz, 2014). Crawford and Schultz (2014) state that John Locke and William Blackstone defined liberty, as it pertains to an individual, as an “unabridged natural right follow his or her own will”. (p.111) In a sense, if an individual believes privacy fits the bill, then it should be respected and left alone. Big Data faces many obstacles when it comes to the topic of privacy. The question of how to correctly respond to each challenge may vary, but success can come if both just and achievable protections are present for those at risk for this type of
Data privacy is vital to healthcare organizations and the health information they store. Johns (YEAR) defines data security as “a collection of protection measures and practices that safeguard data, computers, and associated resources from undesired occurrences and exposures” (p. 207). To protect their information, organizations must develop a data security program to meet the needs of Health Information Portability Accountability Act (HIPAA), stakeholders, and the business’s needs. Additionally following the guidelines set by HIPAA is key to being in compliance with the law. These programs differ depending on the organizations that are required to establish them, however, they all follow the same steps in creating and implementing this program
Groves, P., Kayyali, B., Knott, D., & Kuiken, S. V. (2016). The'big data'revolution in healthcare: Accelerating value and
Dr. (Editor, Health Informatics Journal, Edinburgh, United Kingdom). Medical informatics has emerged as a diverse and important new field of study. The field deals broadly in the science of addressing how best to use information to improve health care. However, protecting public health requires the acquisition, use, and storage of extensive health-related information about individuals in a secured and reliable manner. Though the electronic accumulation and exchange of personal data has an important public health benefits, but have accompanies threatens individual privacy. The breach of privacy can lead to individual discrimination in employment, insurance, and government programs and as such, individuals concerned about privacy invasions may avoid clinical or public health tests, treatments, or research. The variation in state laws supports the need to build consensus on the appropriate use and disclosure of public health information among public health practitioners. Hence, a need for a consistent and congruential protection plan and security as the federal and state privacy protections do not adequately protect public health data, and are inconsistent and
The nation collects volumes of health information, however much of the data remain siloed and difficult to compile. These healthcare big data siloes are making it difficult for insurers, providers, pharmacies and others to truly work together to coordinate care (Clough, 2016). Furthermore, these stakeholders are inhibiting coordinated care through their prevention of using real world data for decision making. Consequently, each patient must still take control of their healthcare and provide physicians, pharmacists, healthcare facilities, and other stakeholders with updated information on their situation, visits, and
Today, it seems as if everyone is connected through his or her own cell phone. With this they create data and information, intentionally or not using them. This information can be collected from applications, text messaging, and simple just walking around with a cell phone connected. This data may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and other association relating to human behavior. The creation and use of this data is what today’s society puts under the large umbrella of big data. This paper discusses the ethics of collection practices and use of big data.
Big data is an interesting concept, in which people use data to analyze trends, patterns, and associations and make use of these revelations to predict outcomes. You are using data every day that is being recorded to identify people’s desires and requests, and more specifically your desires and requests. Big data is used in retail, government, healthcare, car companies, and education, basically everywhere. Big data can allow for great advancements and prevention in all aspects of life, more specifically in healthcare. Big data is important to healthcare, because it can allow professionals to identify who has a greater risk of a disease and thus allows early detection and prevention. It allows tracking which medicine is more effective than the other. It allows for healthcare providers to have better records and accuracy in each and every patient. Big data is important to healthcare and here is why.
The promise of data-driven decision-making is now being recognized broadly, and there is growing enthusiasm for the notion of ``Big Data.’’ While the promise of Big Data is real -- for example, it is estimated that Google alone contributed 54 billion dollars to the US economy in 2009 -- there is currently a wide gap between its potential and its realization.
As we know, for delivering good qualitative service in healthcare industry, data plays an important role. So it’s necessary to understand the fact that the big data must be used in a right way to make health service industries successful. For managing and analysing the big data it’s important to have a good knowledge about the healthcare data complexity, framework, technologies for “big data analytics in healthcare industries”.
Due to the rapid growth in the use of Internet and its connected tools, an enormous amount of data are being produced on a daily basis. The concept of big data arrives when we were unable to manage this huge data with traditional methods. Big data is a mechanism of capturing, storing and analyzing the big datasets and also an idea of extracting some value from it. It is very handful while determining the root causes of failures, issues and defects in near-real time, creating coupons and other sales offers according to the customers shopping patterns, detecting any suspicious and fraudulent activities in real-time. As it is very advantageous, it also has some issues. Some of the common issues can be characterized into heterogeneity, complexity, timeless, scalability and privacy. The most important and significant challenge in the big data is to preserve privacy information of the customers, employees, and the organizations. It is very sensitive and includes conceptual, technical as well as legal significance.