Hadoop: A Gift to the Healthcare Industry

Hadoop is an open-source software framework for storing data and running applications on clusters of commodity hardware. Big data in healthcare industry is used for reducing cost overhead, curing diseases, improving profits, predicting epidemics and enhancing the quality of human life by preventing deaths. 

Hadoop was born out of a need to process an avalanche of big data. Hadoop has been used in various popular applications such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Hadoop and the big data has a high potential specially for healthcare industry. Also, managing healthcare data is exciting, but till now it has not been fully realized and utilised. The main reason for this is that Hadoop has not been well-understood and the healthcare industry doesn’t have the huge quantities of data seen in other industries that would require Hadoop-level processing power.

A recent case study by industry stalwarts declares that Hadoop as the most significant data processing platform for big data analytics in the healthcare sector. Hadoop is an indispensable tool for efficiently storing and processing large quantities of data. Its unique capabilities will offer new ways of thinking about how we use healthcare data and analytics to provide improved patient care at reduced costs. By using Hadoop, data sets can be used easily which were impossible to handle in the past. Various life sciences companies are using genomic and proteomic data to speed drug development.

In the last few years there has been a move towards evidence-based medicine, which involves making use of all clinical data available and transforming that into clinical and advanced analytics. The outcomes of this movement include improved ability to detect and diagnose diseases in their early stages, assigning more effective therapies based on a patient’s genetic makeup and adjusting drug doses to minimize side effects and improve effectiveness. Scientific research labs, hospitals and other medical institutions are leveraging big data analytics to reduce healthcare costs by changing the models of treatment delivery.

Despite the fact that, most of the data in the healthcare sector is stored in printed form, the recent trend is moving towards rapid digitization of this data. Big Data in healthcare industry promises to support a diverse range of healthcare data management functions such as population health management, clinical decision support and disease surveillance.

Big data helps in improving the likelihood of knowing when a particular patient might have an emergency and allow for effective interventions. Also, a client can be provided a better customer experience by offering faster claims processing. The Hadoop or big data helps in collecting this very fast growing data and stream it in real-time for actionable alerts that can help in detecting changes.

Hadoop helps healthcare organizations to detect the fraud based on analysis of anomalies in billing data and patient records. For example, they can analyze patient records and billing to detect anomalies such as a hospital’s overutilization of services in short time periods, patients receiving healthcare services from different hospitals in different locations simultaneously, or identical prescriptions for the same patient filled in multiple locations. Read more about Big Data Analytics using Hadoop and its benefits on Manipal ProLearn.