Healthcare

What is Healthcare Analytics and How Can Big Data Improve the Industry?

Arcserve March 25, 2019 2 min read
Big data is making waves in almost every industry. No matter the sector, businesses are always working on the way they collect, store, sort, and use their data to improve processes and uncover customer patterns. One industry that is harnessing big data in a major way is healthcare.

What is Healthcare Analytics?

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When big data in healthcare is sorted, the process is referred to as healthcare analytics. These studies help specialists gain insights in areas like hospital management, diagnoses, treatments, patient records, and costing on both a macro and micro level, for a variety of positions within the industry. As with most big data analysis, healthcare analytics utilizes different types of tools and platforms to bring together data from different locations. Machine learning and artificial intelligence play a large role in these technologies, one that will continue to grow in importance as analysis becomes more and more robust.

How Can it Benefit Healthcare Providers?

The benefits of healthcare data analytics are many, and they can be grouped into the following categories:

  1. Funding

Donations and grants are often at the root of a healthcare provider’s funding. Big data analysis can help determine key information like growth rates, renewal rates, acquisition and more, simplifying targeting when the time comes for fundraising. Plus, it can help providers set appropriate annual, monthly, weekly, and even daily goals by tracking donor retention, engagement and past contributions.

  1. Patient Treatment and Engagement

Predictive analytics can help to improve the patient treatment process. With access to a patient’s entire medical history, an analytics system can give doctors a fuller picture. It can understand which diseases a patient may be at risk of developing in the future and relay this information to the patient’s doctor. The practitioner can then use this information to distribute preventative medications or advice. For example, analytics systems can identify diabetes before it develops in a patient. Armed with that information, the patient is able to avoid positive diagnoses through early lifestyle changes.
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Healthcare analytics also offers patients the opportunity to become more engaged in their own healthcare journeys. This, in turn, delivers more data for providers to analyze. Health tracking technologies are allowing people to monitor their own health statistics. By offering patients personalized insights based on their own tracking, they will feel encouraged to engage in their own healthcare. This can also help researchers gain more information on public healthcare in general.

  1. Shift Organization

Few people outside the industry understand the struggle of a shift manager on duty at a hospital. Trying to distribute the doctors and nurses on shift who are best suited for each patient is a daunting task. Hospitals all over the world do this every day, every hour. Healthcare analytics is starting to play a role in this essential part of daily hospital life. By tracking past time sheets and patient admissions, analytics tools are able to deliver insights into how busy any given day is likely to be. Shift managers can use that information to schedule accordingly, and ensure they aren’t caught off guard and short staffed on a busy day.

  1. Medical Research

From treatments to prevention, healthcare analytics provide medical researchers with essential information to move the industry forward. There have been instances where experts paired Google Maps with public healthcare data to determine links between stats like population growth and chronic diseases. Healthcare analytics has also been heavily used to help find cancer cures. Plus, electronic health records (EHRs) have made it easy to compare and contrast files between patients seeking treatment in facilities around the country, speeding up and simplifying research.

Security and Healthcare Analytics

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The more data collected in any field, the more important reliable backups and recovery become. Because of the sensitive nature of patient files, healthcare providers are some of the most vulnerable to cybercrime. They’re already dealing with issues like ransomware, phishing, and more. StorageCraft offers simple solutions to backing up big data. Our disaster recovery cloud is always running in the background. It makes reliable backups and replications of every bit of necessary data your business collects. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you with your data security or request a free demo to see our products in action.

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