Importance of data analytics in the Healthcare industry

The Healthcare industry is also a data-intensive industry. Hence in the healthcare industry data analytics is used in its various sectors such as hospitals, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, health insurance companies, research institutions, etc. For the healthcare industry, the use of data analytics brings benefits for the patients, doctors, and researchers as well. Patients can gain deeper insight into their health conditions with the use of data analytics. Data analytics also largely benefitted doctors by providing clearer reports, tracking report history, and summarizing reports of the patients. Researchers are using data analytics to mine data trends related to medicine, enabling better analysis. Researchers can now make future predictions with the help of data analytics. Realizing the importance of data analytics in healthcare almost 50% of hospitals have already adopted data analytics while about 40% have started to implement it.

How data analytics contributes to the health care industry?

The following is a list of ways in which data analytics contributes to the healthcare industry:

Enabling Customized Treatments: With the use of data analytics, data can be digitized, and summaries of patients’ reports can be created very easily. This helps both doctors and patients. For patients, the need to carry their reports for every visit to the doctor is reduced, whereas, for doctors, summaries would eliminate the need to analyze the entire history of the patient. This would help in efficiently providing a better experience to the patients.
Tracking Fitness: Fitness is of utmost importance for most people these days. People are making use of new apps and devices to track the number of calories burnt, time spent in walking/jogging, tracking heartbeats while performing exercises. With data analytics, such data can be easily analyzed which in turn can help doctors to identify the issues and problems with the lifestyles of the patients and carry out corresponding treatments effectively.
Predicting Moods: Physical, as well as biological diseases, can be diagnosed and cured with the help of visible symptoms, but mental diseases, such as anxiety and depression, are difficult to detect. Data analytics can help in detecting these kinds of diseases with the use of mood sensors.
Electronic Health Records (EHR): Electronic Health Records are digital records of a patient’s medical history. EHRs can be shared among multiple healthcare organizations, such as fitness centers and hospitals so that they can use these reports to treat/guide the patients. Further, EHRs can be used to provide telemedicine. Telemedicine is a technology that enables treatment or medical aid from a distance, through calls, messages, and/or video calls.
Pharma Companies: Pharmaceutical companies are using data analytics to produce the right drug at the right time and in the right quantity. In the healthcare industry, data is mostly present in an unstructured format. Data majorly consists of the ultrasound reports, prescriptions, lab test reports such as blood tests, ECG reports, X-ray images, MRI images, data from sensors, and other medical devices.