Continuing our examination of the benefits of analytics on Big Data in the health industry, what further conclusions can be drawn from the Seton Health Care Family example in Part I?
Seton had originally tried to use traditional structured methods, creating fields within files and databases to fit all of the unstructured patient information into. But, this was resulting in too much complexity for them. They were constantly having to create and modify these structures. By using the a big data approach and the analytics tool from IBM, far fewer structures had to be created by them, and most of the data could instead be analyzed in a dynamic way.
What they also discovered, however, was that the gathering of all of this external data on their patients was costly and time consuming and not something that would be reimbursed by insurance companies or the government. So, that is a dilemma that they aware of, and they are doing what they can in a cost effective manner. But, without going through this process, they could easily have wasted a lot of time and money on trying to correct factors that would have had minimal return on reducing readmission rates, also. So, now, at least their focus is in the right places.
The Future of Big Data
With some guidance, you can craft a data platform that is right for your organization’s needs and gets the most return from your data capital.
For another health care example of profiting from Big Data and Analytics, we can look at another article in Forbes magazine, this one by Dan Woods, entitled, “How A Major Hospital Got Healthier With Big Data“. It’s about Europe’s largest university hospital, Charite University of Medicine Berlin, which started to see changes in the use of data back in 2006. A larger swath of hospital personnel were having to contend with ever larger amounts of data.
Their original data warehouse had been primarily used as a repository for historical financial data. But, in the last few years, operational data had also been added. This meant that over 700 people were now accessing it, including senior managers who now could access data about operations, scheduling, patient care, and even patient records. And, it was being accessed through desktops and laptops, as well as in tablets and mobile phones. The entire repository of information now exceeds 1.6 petabytes.
Among the benefits of this expanded availability of information is that, now, scheduling of surgeries can be coordinated with greater precision, making more efficient use of resources and resulting in a big plus for the bottom line. The hospital has also benefited from the greater granularity of information, where they can now see, for example, if increased costs in some areas were due to a higher number of complicated procedures or to waste or inefficiency. They can also spot trends and prepare for them, such as the correlation between the city’s population increases and hospital’s increase in patients.
Of course, there are some challenges. Some managers and staff are finding it hard to deal with so much information, while others simply prefer doing things the way that they always did. With the additional information also comes the issue of how much can shared and with whom. And, they say that they are only making use of about 5% of the information that they have, and that is only going to increase in the future.
While reducing costs and increasing efficiency have been very helpful results from this new big data era, the hospital stresses, as did Seton, that the most important benefit is better patient outcomes, and no one can argue with that.
