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Big data is predicted to show a phenomenal CAGR of 36% by 2025 in electronic health records with practice management solutions of the healthcare sector. This will be tipping the scale at $68 billion of value by 2024.
Most of this precious data is through the rising adoption of wearable devices that are anyway being leveraged by doctors to discover diseases before treatment courses get costly, and the prognosis becomes poor. Most popular devices are furiously collating structured data on healthcare and patients around the globe, and some figures are downright stunning. Fitbit alone has documented:
- 167 bn minutes of exercise
- 90 bn hours of cardiovascular data
- 85 trillion steps taken
Forbes confirmed that big data analytics has successfully been leveraged at Seattle Children’s Hospital to diagnose and identify treatment plans more effectively and before time.
Parkland Hospital, Texas, used big data to reduce 30-day readmissions by 31% for the heart patients, saving 0.5million dollars every year for the hospital, leading to a much larger impact on the patients and healthcare costs.
Human fraud is another significant concern pulling up the care costs and leading to substantial adverse patient outcomes—for instance, fraudulent prescriptions and diagnosis frauds to obtain illegal medications. Chicago based marketing experts Digital Authority Partners confirmed that the best estimates push the cost of medical fraud between $80 billion and $200 billion. They confirmed that fraud account and human error for 10% of the entire US healthcare bill. Using machine intelligence for data analysis for irregularities that point to human error or fraud stands to do significant damage in that $3-trillion healthcare spend.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services used Big Data to identify fraud prevention that could have potentially led to $210 million sunk costs. Big Data plays a crucial role also in reducing false processing entitlement reimbursements, duplicating medical records, and identifying the operational inefficiencies that cost patients hugely.
The Healthcare industry thrives on innovation, and big data sits on the edge of this race towards the future of healthcare. Big data will lead the path to the development of new drugs and diagnostic tools, too, with its accuracy, widespread availability, and the insights that it can share for cutting edge prognosis, diagnosis, and patient welfare.
