The healthcare industry historically has generated large amounts of data, which is driven by record keeping, compliance, regulatory requirements and patient care. As the healthcare today is more of patient-centric care, there is growing acceptance that data is the foundation to better and improved healthcare delivery.
With the advent of rapid digitization in healthcare industry, it has become easy to analyze this large amount of data captured, recognize patterns from which conclusions and decisions can be drawn on the various aspects of healthcare, especially child health. By combining and effectively using big data, following potential benefits can be extracted:
- Analyzing disease patterns to improve child health surveillance;
- Improved and accurate development of more targeted vaccines, e.g., choosing the annual influenza strains;
- Identifying the side effects of any vaccination. Recently in some European countries: 1 in 10 girls given HPV vaccine suffered ‘adverse’ reaction (Source: http://ow.ly/BZ10300jU2e)
- Turning large amounts of data into actionable information that can be used to identify gaps and provide services in child nourishment and vaccinations.
Analyzing such kind of data can help in formulating various policies and measures that may help in better outcome for child health. For example – assessing the Fenton & WHO growth charts in a particular community or region can help in identifying patterns of any normal or abnormal growth in that community. Once identified, regulatory bodies can formulate measures to strength the child growth within that community or region.
Healthcare organizations can improve quality of care coordination and services, power accountability and personalized medicine across the ecosystem, create a competitive advantage for increased market share and reduce costs by having a data-centric focus. By enabling the sharing of quality data across multiple systems IT organizations can provide their users with new ways of achieving their desired outcomes. Lastly, proper data management within healthcare industry is the key to attain MDG related to child and maternal health and unleashing the potential of digital healthcare.
