by Vimal Venkatram
The healthcare industry is growing at an unprecedented pace and much of this growth is driven by the increasing demand for quality healthcare, adoption of technology, and increasing investment in public healthcare systems. With this growth, the healthcare sector is expected to generate huge volumes of data coming from a wide range of sources such as patient records, claims, and hospital administration data.
This data offers limitless opportunities to patients, as well as healthcare and life sciences companies. With insights from data, healthcare providers are able to improve patient outcomes and provide better customer experience through faster and accurate diagnosis and personalised delivery of healthcare. By utilising data analytics, companies within the sector can facilitate the discovery of ground-breaking medicines and treatments and uncover future trends that may impact people’s health. To respond to the demands of the customer and deliver better patient care, hospitals and healthcare providers need to manage their data effectively and ensure they have the technological infrastructure to maximise data assets. By moving to the Data Cloud, businesses within the healthcare sector can leverage their data for better decision-making, and realise new business use cases to open up new revenue streams.
The forecast for global health spending between the year 2020 to 2024 is expected to rise by 3.9 per cent based on Deloitte’s 2021 Global Health Care Outlook report, with Asia and Australasia projected to have the fastest growth rate at 5.3 per cent. In India, according to Research and Markets, the healthcare analytics market is expected to reach INR 47.04 billion by the year 2025, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.49 per cent during the forecast period.
Here are some of the ways healthcare and life sciences companies can utilise their data and create new opportunities for patients, consumers, and organisations:
1. Delivering quality care outcomes through 360-Degree patient views
Digitally enabled approaches to healthcare and patient data management require a shift to value-based care models. Clinicians and care teams, who traditionally gathered patient data through written notes can now access patient health data quickly via centralised electronic health record (EHR) systems. With the advent of mobile health data applications, patients can also access their health information on demand. However, the usage of this information has not evolved past its management. Even though healthcare providers are collecting more patient data than ever, they have not adopted the analytical capabilities to fully distil and leverage the valuable insights trapped within it.
To address this gap, healthcare providers need to develop an IT infrastructure that can unify large volumes of patient data from various sources, perform advanced path and graph analyses to understand patient journeys and use behavioural analytics to identify patient behaviour trends and the impact of treatments. Similarly, for life sciences, organisations or pharmaceutical companies conducting clinical trials, a comprehensive view of patients can be helpful to understand all the data that may affect an outcome or be used to identify a trend. By using a Data Cloud as an integral processing engine for their back-office IT systems, healthcare organisations can develop a 360-degree patient view that can help them deliver better patient outcomes in a variety of ways.
2. Unlocking deeper insights through secure data sharing
Transferring health data has traditionally been inefficient even though the need to transfer sensitive health data is far from new. Data transfer is accomplished in isolated spots today, but it often involves time-consuming processes such as creating copies of data subsets, staging them, and posting them to an FTP server, an Amazon S3 bucket, or even emailing a CSV file. This complex process creates security concerns because of the limitations of the data providers to govern published data.
The Data CloudтАЩs architecture enables secure, simple, and instantaneous data sharing without data movement or copying. For healthcare and life sciences organisations, which need to store, join, query, and share huge and potentially sensitive data sets with customers and partner institutions, this capability is especially relevant. It will allow secure data sharing and capabilities for partner organisations without the need to move petabytes of data from one location to another.
3. Building the next generation of healthcare applications
Harnessing the power of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and cloud computing holds incredible promise for the future of healthcare and life sciences organisations. However, hindered by traditional data stacks and reliant on complex data infrastructures, organisations within the sector struggle to combine data from multiple sources and deliver it to customers in an efficient manner. This lack of flexibility can translate to frustrating customer experiences and an inability to meet changing customer needs.
To support evolving product requirements and build the next generation of healthcare applications, organisations within the sector must invest in modern, flexible architecture such as a Data Cloud. A Data Cloud can accelerate the collection, cleaning, analysis, and reporting of clinical trial data sets while facilitating deeper, predictive analysis and data modelling. In addition, IT development teams, freed from the tedious task of managing burgeoning amounts of health data, can focus on delivering fast, reliable, and useful insights to meet the evolving needs of patients and customers.
With a robust platform to support more complex workloads and power data analytics applications and services, healthcare organisations can save costs by letting go of high-maintenance infrastructures, achieve instant flexibility, infinite scalability and performance, and focus on delivering to their customers’ insights derived from multiple data sources.
Healthcare and life sciences organisations can gain significant benefits by unlocking the value of their data.
By implementing a Data Cloud as part of their digital transformation, healthcare organisations can build a data infrastructure that supports future data management requirements. With the Data Cloud, hundreds of healthcare and life sciences organisations can turn health data into actionable insights, drive medical and technological innovation, and enable better patient care.
Vimal Venkatram is the Country Manager at Snowflake India
(DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETHealthworld.com does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETHealthworld.com shall not be responsible for any damage caused to any person/organisation directly or indirectly).
