Big data in healthcare

Abstract

Big data is the large amount of data that has been popular for the past few decades because of its many uses. Big data is already being used in fields such as business management and machine learning. In recent years it is storming its way in the healthcare industry as well. Electronic health records, efficient staffing, supply chain management is some of the big data applications in the healthcare industry. These applications are discussed in detail later in the paper. Over the years, the need for big data has been increasing because of various factors such as improving patient outcomes, efficiently managing healthcare-related data such as medical records, past diagnostic reports and prescriptions and, documents of various medical tests. Big data can help improve the patient's overall care while keeping the treatment cost low as there would be no need to run redundant tests. But many factors are restricting the use of big data in the field of healthcare. These could be the incompatibility of software or the unwillingness of organizations to share data. But over the years, because of big data, the healthcare industry has been improving towards developing new analytical and computational software that could revolutionize the healthcare industry.