'Beyond IT, Hadoop Can Help India's Healthcare


KOLKATA: With the huge amount of data being generated in India's healthcare sector, experts believe sophisticated software tools like Hadoop can help "sort and make sense" of the information - such as medical records or clinical trial records - to enhance access to and availability of Aservices for the common man.

This sheer volume of raw and unstructured data is referred to as Big Data and is virtually everywhere - whatever you post in a social networking platform, the uncategorised information stored by companies on their servers, even the URLs you bookmarked - all that and more come under it.

Technologies like Hadoop are used to analyse, crunch and sift through all that information. It helps one manage and deduce what certain parts of the data mean and this could in turn indicate trends, patterns and predictions.

Nowadays, the healthcare industry is flooded with enormous amounts of data - around 80 percent of medical data is unstructured - that need validation and accurate analysis, said D. Peter Augustine, assistant professor, computer science department, Christ University, Bengaluru.

"The integration of patient data, data on the effects of drugs, medical data, research and development data and financial records by healthcare and life sciences companies, can help in identifying the patterns that give enhanced and more proactive healthcare," Augustine told IANS on the phone.

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Source: IANS