The healthcare industry has always been grappling with the huge volumes of information they generate during providing their services. Now, that data may actually be helping companies.
“Big Data” has set the media world abuzz for its apparent abilities to yield insights from seemingly disconnected data points. In the healthcare industry, this data often represents real human lives and the outcome of their treatment. By looking at the big picture through big data, healthcare providers can connect the dots and reveal stunning snapshots of what their business is doing now and what they could be doing to improve.
As more hospitals and healthcare service providers adopt data-based analytics into their operating model, expect major disruptions to occur in both healthcare research and practices in the next few years.
Predictive Care
One of the biggest capacities of this new data binge is that physicians have more access than ever to daily health performance. Fitness tracking devices like the Jawbone and Fitbit can provide thousands of hours’ worth of patient data for physicians to study. They can use the models produced by these sources and compare them to benchmarks to determine possible health issues that could arise with the patient and options to address them pre-emptively.
Backing up these benchmarks will eventually be data from millions of other patients, some of whom suffered ailments and exhibited unnoticed symptoms that can be implemented into predictive models. Rather than clinical physicians having to guess if something is wrong with their patient or if something could go wrong someday, they can access data models and algorithms that can tell them within a percentage of likelihood how accurate an early diagnosis may be.
Not only will these predictive models help improve patient health, but they can help the American economy shed the excess weight of the estimated $1.2 trillion in wasted healthcare costs per year.
Research Enablement
One of the most exciting benefits from data-driven analytics is the way the data will be handled itself. In order to make each data point meaningful, a standardized system will be implemented. This data will also become part of a new wave of analytical methods, making the entry predictable but the findings revolutionary.
Researchers can operate under these assumptions to direct their focus so that “new knowledge might be translated into practice,” in the words of Nilay D. Shah writing for the Harvard Business Review.
New research-centered businesses are already on the rise that aggregate data sources like these to create more robust comparative models. Other healthcare research teams can utilize these models to ensure that their findings were not somehow skewed by their research design.
Even healthcare market research teams should be able to benefit from data sharing since it will allow them to account for variables in their individual market that they had not considered. For instance, patient satisfaction surveys can be tied to incidences of certain conditions to answer questions like, “Would we have this high of a rating if we had more cancer patients?”
You can learn more about how to unlock the power of big data and other cutting-edge research trends through our expertise. Request a quote from us to learn more about how we might be able to help your research goals reach their full potential.
