healthcare big data

Tackling Health Care's Toughest Problems With Advanced Statistical Techniques and Large Data Sets


For decades now, some of the most pressing-seeming problems in health care have resisted easy answers. For example, understanding how policies and recommended therapies impact readmission rates has been something of a Holy Grail for health care analysts. Unfortunately, few have made much progress on this problem, at least until recently.

What has changed is that the field is increasingly making use of big data techniques that have proven their worth elsewhere. Given the basic conservatism of the health care industry, it is unsurprising that a new approach would need to be proven in another sector before receiving support. With big data healthcare analysts are now finally addressing many of the issues that have plagued patients and caregivers for far too long.

The big deal with big data in healthcare is that it at last gives analysts the ability to root out the most fundamental correlational and causational relationships in the systems they study. It can be viewed as something of a paradox that these most basic of ties have frequently gone so long without revealing themselves, but the simple fact is that the tools for bringing them to light have not previously been available.



When applied to healthcare big data proves to be exactly what is needed to unveil these fundamentally important relations. Because these connections are often of a relatively subtle sort, it takes large stores of data to elevate them above the random noise that accompanies every statistical query. As more health organizations begin to build up such stores, then, these influences are finally seeing the light of day.

While the effort is still in its early stages, it has become more than clear that the role of healthcatalyst.com is going to be an important one. For the first time in history, analysts are able to study questions concerning the real effectiveness and usefulness of particular tests, the most appropriate uses for particular procedures, and how patients fare under a wide variety of procedural environments.

In doing so, they are frequently producing victories for their organizations that show up with several dimensions simultaneously. It is entirely normal, for example, for a single such study to produce notably improved health outcomes while also cutting costs and improving the time-based efficiency of health care. Given the extent and impressiveness of these results, then, it is clear to most of those who are informed about the matter that big data must necessarily become an even more regular part of the average health system.