Big data in healthcare – hype or hope?

‘Big data’ is enabling companies to learn faster and more deeply than ever before, whether it is to make business decisions faster or find better ways to serve customers, or design and deliver new products and services.

How is it relevant in healthcare? Can healthcare organisations learn and change with the adroitness of other industries, or is healthcare too different? While healthcare is often described as lagging behind its industry siblings in terms of technology maturity and adoption, experts are no less bullish on big data’s potential impact. This is partly because healthcare is fast becoming a big data industry with a data explosion that makes analytics an absolute requirement.

Sir Liam Donaldson, chief medical officer for England (1998-2010), says: “Every health system in the world is struggling to cope with the increased burden of chronic diseases like diabetes, cancer, heart disease and stroke. Too many years are spent incapacitated and suffering with the consequences of poor health.

“Every health minister in the world would like to prevent, or at least postpone the onset, of these diseases. One of the keys to doing this is to gain a greater understanding of people’s behaviour and the factors that influence it.

“Research has already told us a great deal about this but the opportunity to bring together health data with sources of information from many unrelated areas opens new doors. It may take us closer to the means to shape the behaviour patterns of whole populations towards the ultimate goal of enabling tens of millions of people to achieve a better state of health and sustain it for most of their life.”

These issues are explored in a new white paper from The Learning Clinic. Read it here.

Download the white paper

Case study c. The Learning Clinic.

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