Big Data in Healthcare: Improving Patient Outcomes with Predictive Analytics

Tanya Gupta August 23, 2024

Collected at: https://datafloq.com/read/big-data-in-healthcare-improving-patient-outcomes-with-predictive-analytics/

Big data analytics helps doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and specialist medical professionals gain insights into their patients’ health and lifestyle. Therefore, they can ensure all patients receive the best possible care by modifying treatment regimens or drug formulations for timely intervention. This post will elaborate on how big data analytics can assist in improving patient outcomes in the healthcare industry. 

Understanding Big Data and Patient Outcomes 

Big data analytics provides insights into continuously expanding data volumes in scalable data warehouses and lakes. Its strengths include effectively handling mixed data structures and consolidating information from multiple datasets and intelligence sources. Data engineers and architects might offer a unified metadata view when creating extract-transform-load (ETL) pipelines for big data analysts.  

Most medical research institutes and healthcare facilities prefer big data analytics, which facilitates large sample sizes with its vast data aggregation. These large sample sizes are vital for predictive analytics solutions that healthcare professionals can use to estimate patient outcomes, demonstrating the practical significance of predictive and prescriptive data patterns across care settings like hospitals. 

A patient outcome in health and life sciences can encompass recovery rate, non-allergic medication, physical movement improvements, mood stability, or successful health insurance settlements. So, investigating whether an alternative care strategy will help achieve patient outcomes faster necessitates predictive, scenario-dependent insights. 

How Big Data Analytics in Healthcare is Improving Patient Outcomes 

1| Forecasting and Optimizing Healthcare Billing Liabilities 

Healthcare is a universal necessity of human beings that prolongs everyone’s life spans. Unfortunately, patients encounter financial difficulties when seeking advanced medicines, modern clinical equipment, and appointments at specialist clinics. Their families and physicians must evaluate multiple treatment strategies based on travel, hospitalization, and insurance liabilities. 

Therefore, financial planning is paramount across all clinics, medical equipment manufacturers, and pharmaceutical vendors. Besides, your finances are complex due to government support programs in public healthcare. Thankfully, health economics and outcomes research (HEOR) will ensure stakeholders, especially care providers, can predict expenses and regulate them for patient-friendly billing without undermining profitability considerations. 

For example, you can explore generic alternatives to imported medicines. Likewise, HEOR can help hospitals and health insurance providers accelerate claim legitimacy assessments to combat insurance fraud. Therefore, genuine claimants can benefit from quick settlements, and more individuals will gladly enroll in comprehensive health insurance plans instead of selective ones. 

Leaders can study how government schemes for underserved communities, pregnancy-related treatments, specially-abled persons, and senior citizens impact their billing components. Integrating them helps make health and life sciences offerings more affordable for a broader patient base. 

2| Healthcare Analytics Can Capture and Rectify Medication Issues 

Incorrect prescriptions aggravate the unfavorable health conditions experienced by the patients. One benefit of big data analytics predictive insights in healthcare is enhanced oversight of how physicians and pharmacists supply medicines to patients. As a result, your institution mitigates the legal risks associated with unreliable pharmaceutical remedies. 

Consider human and technological errors that cause medication inaccuracies. A few flaws in a clinical database, such as identical patient names or outdated appointment records, might lead to pharmacists handing out unhelpful medicines. 

Big data analytics customized for healthcare and pharmaceutical stakeholders can create an environment of prescription accountability by continuously recording patients’ drug intakes, inventory access logs, and hospitalization specifics. Meanwhile, you can upgrade clinical intelligence by identifying ineffective medicines and replacing them with better alternatives. As a result, authorities, hospitals, pharma companies, and medical associations will modernize prescription regulation methods using analytics and big data to actualize patient outcomes. 

3| Lowering the Patients’ Readmission Rates 

Big data analytics might help healthcare businesses and institutions solve problems involving high readmission rates. Readmission means a discharged patient returns to the medical facility quickly after completing earlier treatment regimens for identical diseases. It can also indicate the following causes. 

Patients suffering from numerous disorders showed symptoms at different times. 

During their first visit, patients’ diagnoses were incorrect, or they did not comply with all requirements in the assigned treatment plans. 

Harmful microbes became immune to the prescribed medication because the patients used the same medicine multiple times without informing supervisory caregivers or physicians. 

Environmental, lifestyle, or workplace factors stressed patients whose bodies and minds had not completely recovered. 

Analyzing your patient records or medical history can help you understand the above risks. Therefore, you require reliable healthcare analytics and relevant big data strategies to uncover these trends. 

4 | Big Data Analytics in Healthcare Will Improve Operational Efficiency 

Reputed hospitals and medical research providers must process ample documentation challenges. Given the benefits of big data and predictive analytics, healthcare institutions can increase the efficiency of hospitalization and outpatient operations. 

Medics can leverage big data to study the progress of large-scale disease outbreaks, plan responses to epidemics, and forecast patient intake requirements. 

At the same time, medical device manufacturers and government officials can develop infection-preventing policies, monitor patients under care, and alert citizens about disease hot spots. Furthermore, healthcare analytics can improve data processing encompassing clinical trials, medical records, and billing. 

Challenges in Healthcare Analytics and Patient Outcomes Research 

HEOR and laboratory test datasets increase data governance and cybersecurity requirements. Therefore, healthcare providers must implement fully-encrypted communication and documentation methods. If they hire unsafe data processors, they risk handing over patients’ clinical records to nefarious individuals. 

Similarly, policymakers will keep changing laws regulating how hospitals, medical researchers, and telemedicine software developers exchange data. For example, they will redefine terminologies like explicit and informed consent, directing stakeholders to modify their clinical consent management practices. 

You might struggle to find the right talent and best tools to lead healthcare-related big data aggregation, validation, and reporting projects. 

If successful, corporate espionage attempts can allow competitors to replicate your healthcare analytics, experimentation, and predictive modeling secrets. 

Conclusion 

Big data analytics empowers health and life sciences brands to extract valuable insights by processing vast databases to improve patient outcomes. After all, combating incorrect medication risks and optimizing treatment regimens becomes more manageable as stakeholders utilize efficient reporting. 

Regulators, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical businesses can also devise affordable healthcare using HEOR insights. These stakeholders want to keep up with innovative health and life sciences trends. Reports suggest they are eager to embrace scalable data ecosystems for holistic patient insights and appreciate predictive analytics’ advantages. Through evidence-backed care planning, big data analysts craft effective treatment regimens for a healthier and happier community.