What’s so ‘Big’ about ‘Data’ ?
Over last couple of years, the term ‘Big Data’ has been over-used so much that everyone wants do something with it.
Now this becomes tricky in healthcare. Hospitals and clinics generate a lot of data everyday, which obviously can give valuable insights , provided that the data has been analysed properly. Not just to give charts, but also generate inferences.
Walk-in BI... ‘Business Intelligence’ or more commonly known as BI tools marvellously help users to massage the data in multiple ways to generate various charts. A. Who has the time to do so in an already time-crisis driven healthcare society and B. Even if you do manage to harvest the data to get the tables and charts, what next ? What do the charts suggest, what’s the insight ?
Simply adopting a BI tool doesn’t seem the answer to what benefits, data can bring? You may actually need a person or a team to work on Health Informatics. Many may agree, this is not a core competence for a hospital or clinic - it should be outsourced to specialists.
The administrative team of the hospital / clinic should simply provide the operational inputs to the informatics team. They will then do the number crunching. This way, both teams should work cohesively to deliver results.
Breaking down the analytics process in 4 simple steps -
- Identify the pain area
- Look for data there
- Analyse the data
- Make decisions
Then data will deliver results, simple to comprehend. Goal achieved !