Health data analytics: Current perspectives, challenges, and future directions

Abstract

Over the last decade, there has been a tremendous growth in the amount and diversity of electronic health-related data, such as patient records, drug information, drug–disease associations, medical resource allocations, and clinical experiments’ results, altogether referred to as medical big data. Health data analytics refers to the proper exploitation of medical big data in view of getting better understandings that can drive health research, which may ultimately accelerate advancements in biomedicine, enhance patient outcomes, and reduce overall healthcare costs. This chapter provides an extensive review of the application areas that can benefit from health data analytics, namely drug–disease association, disease outbreak detection and surveillance, pharmacovigilance, healthcare management, clinical research, and clinical practice. A variety of tools and platforms have been developed to support health data analytics, each dealing with different application areas and diverse data types. These tools are analyzed. The challenges and future directions of health data analytics are also discussed.