Deriving Value from Big Data Analytics in Healthcare: A Value-focused Thinking Approach

Abstract

With the potential to generate more insights from data than ever before, big data analytics has become highly valuable to many industries, especially healthcare. Big data analytics can make important contributions to many areas, such as enhancements in the quality of patient care and improvements in operational efficiencies. Big data analytics provides opportunities to address concerns such as disease diagnoses and prevention. However, it has posed challenges such as data security and privacy issues. Also, healthcare institutions have concerns about deriving the greatest benefit from their big data analytics endeavors. Therefore, identifying actionable objectives that can help healthcare organizations derive the maximum value from big data analytics is needed. Using the value-focused thinking (VFT) approach, we interviewed individuals associated with data analytics in healthcare to identify actionable objectives that one needs to consider to derive value from big data analytics, which practitioners can use for their own endeavors and provide opportunities for future research.