What Bringing Big Data Analytics Into Healthcare Means For Patients

Big data can be thought of as the digital collection of an exponentially large amount of data for the purpose of later analysis to discover trends, patterns, and associations. Big data has had a big effect on the business world. It is especially making a difference in the healthcare industry. Here are just some of the ways that implementing big data analytics in healthcare can make a significant difference for patients.

Better Preventative Care and More Informed Doctors

One of the biggest impacts big data will have on medicine is leading to more preventive healthcare strategies for patients. More medical data on individuals will be able to be collected and stored than ever before. IBM describes big data in terms of quintillions of bytes. That’s a lot of information.

Some of this data will certainly come from wearable 'smart' technology. You may know many products that use this kind of tech such as the Apple Watch that has the ability to track the wearer’s heartbeat. This same tech will be applied strictly for medical use. Patients will wear small lightweight devices that can track things like heart rate, breathing, temperature, sleep patterns, blood pressure and more. Certain devices can even tell if a patient has fallen and needs help.

All this health information will be collected via a Wi-Fi connection and sent to cloud storage.