Transforming Healthcare Analytics

CHAPTER 4Technology

“Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.”

— Sir Tim Berners-Lee

We mentioned in Chapter 1 that the healthcare industry is collecting more data than ever before, in all varieties of structured and unstructured data. It was noted that, by 2020, healthcare data will exceed 2.314 zettabytes of data and is expected to increase by 48% annually. With all of this data, healthcare organizations are presented with great opportunities and greater challenges. There has never been a greater need for proactive and agile strategies to capture the opportunities and conquer the challenges with technology. Well-understood scenarios are fed by lots of data. The more data you have to draw from to examine dependencies and relationships, the better prediction and impact they will make to insight-driven decisions for healthcare. As the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee accurately stated, “Data is a precious thing,” and with the current landscape of technologies, there is so much healthcare organizations can do to improve performance, economics, and governance.

What strategies and technologies should you consider? A list would include the following:

• Buying more hardware and software
• Process improvement to data management
• Data movement with analytics
• In-database
• In-memory
• Open source
• 3D printing
• Cybersecurity
• Virtual and mixed reality

How should you evaluate the technologies for organizational needs? Another list would include: ...