Cognitive Computing and Big Data Analytics

CHAPTER 11 Building a Cognitive Healthcare Application

The healthcare industry is a large and complex ecosystem that encompasses many different types of organizations that support patient wellness and care. The ecosystem is broad, with a number of well-defined roles including:

• Healthcare providers
• Healthcare payers
• Medical device manufacturers
• Pharmaceutical firms
• Independent research labs
• Health information providers
• Government regulatory agencies

Although there have been enormous technological advances that have enabled organizations to improve health outcomes for patients, the need for continued technical innovation is at a tipping point. Each segment of this ecosystem has typically managed healthcare information in a siloed way making it difficult to share patient and medical research data across the various stakeholders. The volume and variety of healthcare data that needs to be managed, analyzed, shared, and secured is growing at a fast pace. Even when participants are motivated to share information for mutual benefit, the required data is often inconsistent and disconnected, which can slow down progress in medical research and lead to clinical errors that put people’s lives at risk. Depending on the methodology used to measure medical mistakes, preventable harm leading to death is either the third leading cause of death in the United States behind heart disease and cancer or the sixth behind accidents and ahead of Alzheimer’s disease.

This chapter looks at several ...