NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

The health care industry generates zettabytes of data every day in terms of patient care records, prescriptions, lab tests, pharmacy sales, electronic patient records, insurance claims data, machine-generated sensor data from monitoring vital signs, etc. Big Data solutions can help the industry acquire, organise and analyse this data to optimise resource allocation, plug inefficiencies, reduce cost of treatment, improve access to health care and advance medicinal research.

It can help the government with disease control. For e.g. Dengue is a recurring disease in many parts of India. The health department can acquire historical outbreak data, collect Sensor data from Ministry of Environment and Meteorology department, collect social media data with relevant keywords like flooding, fever, dengue, mosquito etc. They can organize and analyze these data sets to determine seasonality, check for correlation between weather pattern and occurrence of disease and be prepared to prevent the spread / better manage an outbreak.