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Is Big Data Useful Data In Healthcare It
Roopesh Kumar
VP of IT-RxEOB
Thursday, October 13, 2016
In today's information driven society, data is everywhere throughout the healthcare management chain. When it pertains to big data, being able to find actionable items that can be used to create real-world results is often considered important, but understanding whether or not big data is ultimately useful for healthcare IT is a question that is being.

Big Data offers the potential for outstanding value and positive patient outcomes in healthcare management. From predictive analytics to the comprehensive analysis of a health plan member's preferences and experiences, Big Data can assist healthcare plans find the path to optimized care. Insurers, PBMs, and ACOs should remember that they have Big Data at their fingertips, and now is the time to understand how they can leverage that information to drive positive outcomes. These organizations can utilize Big Data to take existing eligibility, claims, formulary, and patient-provided data to create personalized messaging.

A study by McKinsey shows that the implementation of Big Data information could offer transformations for the management of healthcare, but a number of challenges are still in place for health plans and providers to be able to incorporate Big Data into their overall planning and execution. Health plans must develop strategies to mine EMR data from various provider enterprise applications, and then integrate it with other administrative data to deliver on the goal of driving Big Data analytics towards better care.

The Institute for Health Technology Transformation states "Health data is diverse and distributed in hard-to-penetrate silos owned by a multitude of stakeholders. To complicate matters, each stakeholder has different interests and business incentives while still being closely intertwined."

There can be some caveats in regards to how Big Data can be leveraged for better client outcomes, especially in regards to messaging programs designed for patients. Personalized data that is relevant does not need to wait for the machinations of Big Data output and related analytics to be able to offer outstanding value for patients. Leveraging analytics and creating rules to identify the most effective ways to send the right message to the right patients at the right time is the key for significant cost savings for healthcare providers.

While Big Data is useful for creating the potential for outcomes, Big Data by itself will not be able to offer outstanding results without ways to deliver that data from various sources into actions for providers and patients themselves. Big Data efforts can attempt to integrate disparate data sets, and if accessible by an analytics and messaging platform, plans and PBMs can create rules to identify the patient populations who would benefit the most from being sent a personalized message at the right time through the patient's preferred communication. Using programs to inform patients of benefits, medicine reminders and other pertinent patient notifications can not only raise adherence to beneficial medical programs, but can also offer substantial costs savings for both healthcare providers and patients.

From mobile messaging reminders to patients to follow-up treatment regimens for chronic diseases to portals designed to offer patients, providers, and PBMs information regarding opportunities to lower the cost of prescription medication, the support system for Big Data must be in place for the information culled from Big Data sources to have true effectiveness and drive positive patient outcomes. Without useable delivery systems in place to handle the outflow of Big Data as it pertains to individual patients and providers, Big Data will continue to be an often misunderstood, yet rarely utilized, component of the information society of today.

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