Opportunities for big data in healthcare

Industry participants, including governments, payers, providers, suppliers and consumers, must develop Big Data strategies with clear goals to improve specific processes, such as patient engagement, clinical decision making, population health/risk management, and outcomes improvement.

This is crucial to achieve the future vision of a patient-centric, predictive and prescriptive healthcare system. “Globally, healthcare is moving towards value-based, preventive models of care, albeit at varying degrees across countries,” said Transformational Health Research Analyst Natasha Gulati.

“In the next five years, a number of countries in Europe and Asia-Pacific will adopt care models that reward clinicians for improving long-term patient outcomes, particularly for chronic diseases, rather than volume of care delivered. This change in key performance indicators will necessitate better data aggregation, analytics, and compliance from clinicians.”

In its recent analysis of this evolving market, Frost & Sullivan assesses a large set of healthcare Big Data case studies to identify stakeholders and segments that will present attractive opportunities for Big Data solutions going forward. Case studies include:

• IBM’s Big Data solutions for the African Government’s Ebola Humanitarian Efforts, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services’ insurance fraud identification efforts, the Seattle Children’s Hospital’s care efforts, as well as industry partnerships to develop new solutions for diabetes care with Medtronic and self-care apps on Apple smart devices;
• SAS’s analytics for HealthPartners to reduce costs and improve patient care;
• Elsevier product partnerships with Germany’s public insurance vendor, spectrumK, as well as Indian healthcare provider Medanta and Taiwan’s Cathay General Hospital.

An increasingly data-empowered clinical workforce and consumer base are demanding on-the-go data analytics to better manage care. While consumer and end-user interest is high, a critical missing element at an enterprise level is a change management strategy which goes beyond training clinicians on Big Data tools.

“The value of health data lies in meaningfully integrating and analysing structured and unstructured health data so that it helps clinicians develop unprecedented approaches and solutions to real-world problems,” noted Gulati.

“Change management driven from within by opinion leaders, and in collaboration with IT decision makers, will create a strong drive towards Big Data management and analytics in the next five years.”

Ultimately, the goal is to make healthcare more predictive and prescriptive through meaningful information and insights. The primary areas of Big Data and analytics application will be Population Health Management (PHM), Clinical Decision Support (CDS), and real-world data.

By 2020, the global healthcare big data and analytics market revenue is expected to reach $7.50 billion with the Americas leading, Europe catching up fast, and Asia a distant third.