Healthcare is one of the highest growing industries in the whole world. Over 14.3 billion people are employed in the industry, and it’s projected that 3.2 million new jobs that are related to healthcare would be created over the next eight years.
These days, healthcare software services have to respond by increasing the investment in technology, particularly mobile communications to better enable the workforces. Technology investment could lead to higher quality of patient care, lower cost of care for healthcare providers and users, shorten the time to deliver and get care and provide more patient autonomy in the delivery of healthcare as well.
Innovations in care models, service and information delivery could revolutionize the healthcare future. Custom healthcare software development help customers in the industry achieve better efficiency within the operations, coordinate to boost outcomes and integrate with new partners for a more personalized, sustainable and patient-centered system that is value-focused.
Custom software development healthcare industry has become a giant industry, with the need for more software solutions that are specifically centered to healthcare services.
BIG DATA IN THE FIELD OF HEALTHCARE
The industry may have gotten off to a slower start compared to other industries in taking thorough advantage of big data. Today, however sophisticated sensors connected via the IoT are used on medical equipment as well as on bodies of patients, and in wearable devices, such as watches, clothing and glasses. Today, a lot of organizations in the data-rich industry are focused on big data and analytics to make changes in patient education, treatment and a whole lot more.
FIVE WAYS THAT THE HEALTCHARE INDUSTRY COULD USE BIG DATA
- Prevent medication errors. Medication errors are serious issues in healthcare companies. Since humans always make an occasional error, patients at time end up with the wrong medication that could cause harm and even death. Big data could dramatically help reduce the error rates through analyzing the records of a patient with all the prescribed medications and flagging anything that appears to be out of place.
- Identify high-risk patients. A lot of healthcare systems have to contend to high rates of patients who are using the emergency department repeatedly, driving up healthcare costs and do not lead to better outcomes or care for the patients. With predictive analytics, some hospitals were able to reduce the number of emergency room visits through identifying patients who are at high risk and providing customized, patient-centered care.
- Lower hospital costs and wait times. The same as with a lot of other industries, there’s enormous potential to cut costs with big data in healthcare. Also, there’s an opportunity to minimize wait times, something that will cost money. One hospital in Paris uses predictive analytics to help with staffing. Through predicting admission rates over the next couple of weeks, the hospital then could be staff based on the numbers. There are a lot of ways that hospitals could cut costs with the use of predictive analytics.
- Preventing fraud and security breaches. Based on one study, the healthcare industry is 200 percent likely to experience data breach compared to other industries, just because personal data is very valuable. With this in mind, some companies have used big data to prevent security threats and fraud. For instance, The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services were able to prevent a fraud in a staggering amount of $210.7 million in just one year with the use of big data analytics.
- Boosting patient engagement and outcomes. The interest of consumers in devices that keep tabs of steps taken, heart rate, hours slept and other data daily shows that introducing the devices as a doctor aid could help boost patient engagement and outcomes. New wearables could track particular health trends and relay them to the cloud where they could be monitored by doctors. This could be helpful for everything, from blood pressure to asthma, and help patients to remain independent and lower unnecessary visits to doctors.
- Widespread usage of electronic health records or EHR. The healthcare industry overall could save as much as $400 billion through leveraging big data properly, but adoption is slow. The great news is that most hospitals finally have switched over to using electronic health records, making it easier for healthcare professionals’ easy access to data. This is a first great step to make implementation easier for big data platforms, since there is much data to work with. Nevertheless, with the cautious approach a lot of hospitals take to change, and the overwhelming number of possible apps, many admins are overwhelmed and not sure where to begin. Yet, as more healthcare companies jump on board with big data and analytics, the practices would be the norm, instead of the exception.
DEVELOPING MEDICATIONS MORE EFFICIENTLY
Using big data and analytics could help pharmaceutical firms to identify new drugs and develop them in a more efficient way. At present, pharmaceutical companies and physicians still rely mainly on textbooks and small clinical trials, typically with healthy patients having only one disease. However, most real world patients have more than one ailment. A potential benefit of big data is to determine potential patients to enroll in clinical trials, based for instance on genetic information, social media profiles and information gathered in the EHR or electronic health records and not only on the evaluation of doctors. This helps adjust to smaller groups and so less expensive.
The potential to boost patient outcomes, understand disease and even cure cancer, all seems to be just around the corner with the advances in the quality and quantity of data collected, along with the computing power of analyzing and understanding it.
The big data trend in the healthcare field appears to be unstoppable. The concept is robust and big data is indeed working today. It is up to healthcare service providers and professionals to harness the power of big data to ach8ieve the goal of fast, good and most of all affordable healthcare. Healthcare software applications have become important tools for healthcare institutions, facilities and physicians to provide the best healthcare service possible.