While big data is commonly associated with big businesses, there are other industries that are currently using big data for their own operations. These companies include those in the healthcare industry. This data is proving valuable for experts in the pharmaceutical companies and health care providers, as it provides them with the insights they need to do their work and do it more efficiently.

Applications

The applications of data mining in healthcare have a lot of potential. All of these applications fall under any one of these analytics:

• Descriptive – insights that describe what has already happened.
• Predictive – insights that allow you to anticipate what will happen.
• Prescriptive – insights or ideas on what to do next.

Drilling down further, big data mining can help give insights on:

Effectiveness of treatment. By working with data that healthcare providers have on their patients, applications can evaluate the treatments and how effective they are. You can take a look at the causes, symptoms and treatments done on the patients and see which treatments are most effective for certain kinds of conditions as well as the best courses of action to take as well as the most cost-effective ones as well. This should help in standardizing cures.

Side effects. If you get to know what are the best medical treatments are available for every patient, you would also be able to determine different side effects of these treatments, allowing you to further administer the best drug combinations and identify the population that are at risk of these side effects.

Healthcare management. Mining your big data can also help you manage your operations. Big data can help you identify and monitor chronic diseases, patients who are high risk, proper treatments and even lessen the number of claims and admissions. You could cull the data from your readmission records and contrast that with current research and come up with the best treatments for a variety of diseases. You could also check the data on your patients to see which groups take up the most resources. And knowing the high risk group, you could come up with prevention programs or education programs that would help these groups stay out of the hospital.

Another application under this category would be identifying high cost patients, identifying areas for improvement and helping in coming up with better quality health care.

Customer relationship management. Hospitals and clinics are businesses too, and as such there are a lot of opportunities for big data to help improve customer relationships. Using your current data, you can find out what a patient would need in the future, whether a patient would comply with his or her prescribe treatment or if the patient needs preventive care.

Abuse and fraud. You can also use your data to detect abuse and fraud. This is done by analyzing which patterns are considered normal and which ones are considered as unusual. For instance, you could determine whether a drug that has been prescribed by a doctor is inappropriate and whether a claim is fraudulent.

If you are into the health care business, you might want to get into big data and data mining now. Why not call Four Cornerstone at 1 (817) 377 1144 today and see how we could help you get your big data and data mining systems off the ground.

Photo by Christoph Scholz.