How Will Advances in Big Data, IT, Cloud Computing and Analytics Impact Healthcare - Essay Example

IT, Big Data & Healthcare Market - How Will Advances in Big Data, IT, Cloud Computing and Analytics Impact Healthcare? By Table of Contents Table of Contents 2 Introduction 3 Use of IT in Healthcare Industry: Historical Background 3 Impact of IT, Big Data, Cloud Computing and Analytics on Healthcare Industry 5 Impact of IT on Healthcare Industry 5 Impact of Big Data on Healthcare Industry 6 Impact of Analytics on Healthcare Industry 8 Impact of Cloud Computing on Healthcare Industry 9 Dealing with Inefficiencies 10 The Concept of Competition 11 Conclusion and Recommendations 11 References 12 Introduction The healthcare industry has a significant impact on the quality of our lives as well as how we live within the world. Hence, the mistakes in the healthcare industry can have critical and dangerous consequences or penalties that can have an effect on our capability to carry out communal and creative activities. In their paper, (Fichman et al., 2011) discuss that up till now a large number of researches have been carried out to see the impact of information technology (IT) on the healthcare industry. These researchers draw attention to the seriousness of hostile measures in hospitals and the threats such actions cause to the public and the individuals. On the other hand, any kind of medical mistakes (that is a major reason of unfavorable actions and other troubles are costly, raise patient hospital duration of stay, and sometimes cost human lives. In addition, if the healthcare sector fails to have power over infectious diseases it can lead to serious public health problems. For that reason, ensuring maximum quality in the healthcare sector is industriously followed and carefully carried out. In this scenario, information technology can make easier to deal with such issues by identifying and keeping an eye on mistakes at a variety of phases all along the range of care. In addition, information technology performs a critical job at both national and individual levels (Fichman et al., 2011; Southard et al., 2000). In this scenario, big data, cloud computing and analytics are some of the major forms of information technology is being used in the healthcare industry. In fact, healthcare firms have already started adopting these latest IT trends. The basic purpose of this research is to analyze the impact of these latest technologies on healthcare industry. This research attempts to answer the question “how will advances in big Data, IT, cloud computing and analytics impact healthcare?” Use of IT in Healthcare Industry: Historical Background The research shows that healthcare industry was not much competitive until the mid-1960s. At that time, all the calculations were simple as service fees was calculated by adding a fee to sensible profit and build this to patients. In this scenario, Medicare compensated health care expenses associated with patients’ treatment and the patient paid almost 45% of this cost. This situation continued until 1983. It was 1984, when Medicare decided to alter its payment system by implementing a flat rate payment system based on each patient’s diagnosis given by a Diagnosis Related Group. In the1990s, the health care became more challenging because of higher market competition which was an outcome of various changes in government rules and regulations. Additionally, with the passage of time the competition further grown and health care industry started to shift their strategy from “a fee-for-service” to “a managed-care” and “a patient-focused hospital” which was impossible to implement without effective support of information technology. With the changes and improvements in health care environments also changed the role of information technology. The majority of researchers believe that competition was less concentrated; however the basic purpose behind introducing information technology was to automate and support simple management processes for instance payment matters and administrative actions (Southard et al., 2000; Raghupathi, 1997; Akbar, 2003; Krey et al., 2012). There were certain inefficiencies in the previous systems. With the passage of time and advancements of information technology healthcare industry also introduced latest tools and technologies. In this scenario, some of the latest tools and technologies that are currently being used in healthcare industry include big data, cloud computing and analytics. These terms will be discussed in detail in the coming sections. Impact of IT, Big Data, Cloud Computing and Analytics on Healthcare Industry Impact of IT on Healthcare Industry Many researchers have discussed the role of information technology in the healthcare sector for the reason that health care information technology internationally, and especially in the European Union has been emerging and getting used to in the past few years to the impact of an elderly population and to epidemiological transformations in the circumstance of economic chains. Seeing the ever-increasing benefits of information technologies, the majority of healthcare firms and research institutes are more and more focusing on incorporating care with the support of a wide variety of healthcare services and facilities comprising diagnostic and basic care centers, clinics and acute care hospitals. Keeping in mind varying trends healthcare organizations are continuously struggling to make certain high levels of competence and efficiency in the condition of their services. At the present, there is tremendous pressure over healthcare professionals and management to deal with a number of different issues and challenges such as increasing expenditures, medical mistakes, incompetence, contradictory quality, failing doctor contentment, and increasing employees’ shortages. In this scenario, if healthcare sector effectively deals with these issues it will eventually lead to improved health care. On the other hand, the process can be complicated and overpowering for the reason that the challenges and issues themselves. Without a doubt, information itself or lack of it is one of the most critical problems of today’s health care. For that reason, effective use of information technology should be a major element of the way out. Theoretically, the entire idea looks relatively straightforward. The healthcare firms should be able to precisely document comprehensive and understandable clinical remarks and observations; inhabit a complete, life span digital record for every patient (such as medicine account, lab tests, and radiology images etc.); offer easy access to disease management and resulted information to facilitate staff members make effective health care related decisions; avoid medical mistakes by keeping the record of whole patient history readily available, and so on (Harrison, 2006; Healthcare IT, 2007; Fichman et al., 2011). Impact of Big Data on Healthcare Industry The term “big data” is normally used as a marketing concept refers to data sets whose size is further than the potential of normally used enterprise tools to gather, manage and organize, and process within an acceptable elapsed time. In fact, the size of these huge data sets is believed to be a continually growing target. Additionally, the size of big data is presently ranging from a few dozen terabytes to a number of petabytes of data in a single data set (Josyula et al., 2011, p.89). In the past few years, the trend of using big data has quickly increased particularly in the healthcare sector. It is expected that in the next year it will further grow from $30 billion to $34 billion predominantly due to increasing use in the healthcare sector. It is believed that this investment is more than counteract by the expected opportunities in minimizing healthcare operating cost, with organizational deficiencies and mistakes predictable to cost providers $100-$150 billion yearly. Additionally, the majority of healthcare firms are turning to IT providers for instance Microsoft, SAS, Oracle, Dell and IBM for hiring their data-mining proficiency. They believe that it will help them carry out detective work as well as improve the quality of health care services. In this scenario, by making “purposeful use” of information technology particularly latest IT supported tools and technologies, healthcare providers can qualify for getting the support of millions of dollars from the Obama administration’s health care funding program which they launched in 2009 to support digitization of healthcare data and medical records. There are many cases which can be acknowledged as the successful examples of information technology use to some quantifiable enhancements in the healthcare industry. For instance, in 2010, New York-Presbyterian implemented Microsoft technology to scan and keep track of patient records, which proved to be successful and reduced the pace of potentially lethal blood clots almost by a third (Robertson, 2012; Easterwood & Power, 2012). It is expected that big data will present a large number of opportunities and benefits to the healthcare sector. In fact, it will improve efficiency and quality of health care services. In this scenario, some of the analysts anticipate that the US healthcare sector can generate just about $400 billion in value every year if they successfully make use of big data. Another most important prospect of big data is that it will help healthcare firms deliver better treatment and decrease chances of errors because of the research opportunities offered by big data (Chai, 2012; Fluckinger & Writer, 2011; Rooney, 2012). Without a doubt, big data can improve the capabilities of entire healthcare industry, however value-based payment system have possibly the most to achieve from big data. If we take the example of ACO model, which takes into consideration quality metrics and reduction in total cost of care, in this scenario, big data can support its both the perspectives through comprehensive patient management and health trend analysis, ensuring health care services both more efficient and more personal. In addition, it further provides an excellent support for quality of care over absolute quantity (Chai, 2012; Fluckinger & Writer, 2011; Rooney, 2012). Impact of Analytics on Healthcare Industry In the past few years, there has emerged a latest IT trend known as “analytics”. Basically, it is a quantitative and statistical analysis process that is based on analytical and explanatory models, as well as it speedily turned out to be a foundation stone of organizations’ performance analysis. As discussed above, this latest IT trend emerged due to access to the necessary data, for the reason that quick latest IT advancements facilitate organizations to gather, organize and process huge volumes of data. For instance, healthcare firms providing services to thousands of patients can now gather and organize data on millions of transactions on a daily basis and make use of it for improving care and setting prices (Fahey, 2009) Though, analytics is not a recently emerged trend but organizations have recently taken it from the back room into the boardroom. At the present, organizations compete on the strength of their analytical potential and competencies. In the same way, healthcare firms have started to make use of a wide variety of statistical and mathematical analyses to make effective decisions, turn those decisions into their actions, improve the performance of their organization, improve their relationships with their patients, and even begin determining what kinds of human resources they should recruit. The research has shown that effective decisions are based on effective facts and data and analysis. In addition, analytics also play a significant role in the healthcare industry. For instance, in an article (Davenport et al., 2009) relates analytics to medicine by saying that when they perform Bariatric surgery on people, cut down their intestines, people lose almost 25 percent of their weight. In some cases, they do not lose weight. On the other hand, in some case they lose so much that they are too thin. There are variations in the responses but why the results are different in different cases? It is a field of biology that is known as genetic. It deals with the study of relationships between diseases or treatments unpredictability, inconsistency and genetic framework allows us to recognize those susceptible just about a fifth of the cost and an order of scale quicker than the customary way of performing these tasks. So we have got all these capabilities because of analytics (Davenport et al., 2009; Tyagi, 2003). Impact of Cloud Computing on Healthcare Industry Cloud computing is a cost effective methodology of delivering enterprise IT that is believed to be a proper democratization of Web computing. It has not only changed the business models and the way IT environments are being implemented and used, however also the present an architecture and support regarding how should organizations build, implement, execute and maintain applications. In simple words, cloud computing allows organizations to contract out some or full IT processes to manage and execute a organizational activities from the public Cloud that offers an efficient and extremely leveraged technology platform for management of an organizations processes. It reduces organization’s IT expenditures and provides organizations with the human resources and proficiency to generate a “pre-integrated set” of software tools and applications. In addition, the expenditures are reduced and quality is improved for reason that IT operations are managed by a third party organization. The research has suggested that cloud computing and open standards are significant foundation stone to make health care services more efficiently whether it is for keeping track of health records, dealing with diseases and cares more effectively and efficiently, examining and monitoring of patients, or communication and collaboration with colleagues and analysis of data. The majority of researches forecast that shifting health care services and applications to the clouds will bring groundbreaking change in the way health care services are managed in today’s environments. In this scenario, easy and affordable access to health care ever-present will help healthcare industry deal with healthcare inefficiencies as their data will for all time be accessible at anytime from anywhere, and it will also reduce the expenditures significantly for the reason that cloud computing is a cost effective technology (Zhang & Liu, 2010; Dhar, 2012). As discussed above the cloud technology can be an effective solution to eliminate certain inefficiencies for the reason that it supports external collaboration with healthcare professionals and patients, which can improve the quality of services and bring innovative changes to the healthcare sector. In fact, the cloud computing can support communication and collaboration by bringing together various dispersed teams of people who can communicate, collaborate and share information, resources and processes. For instance, HealthHiway is a cloud-based health information network, which facilitates the sharing of transactions and information among healthcare firms, human resources, practitioners, payers, third-party administrators and patients. In addition, more than 1,100 hospitals and 10,000 doctors are connected to this system. Moreover, this solution offers excellent mechanisms for communication, collaboration and information sharing, helping healthcare firms to offer enhanced care at a minimum price (Berman et al., 2012; Sumner et al., 2012). Dealing with Inefficiencies The research has shown that performing healthcare activities and implementing measures manually is a daunting, time-consuming and costly process that increases expenditures and overhead for any health care firm. In their paper, (Sumner et al., 2012; Thatcher & Oliver, 2001) discuss that it costs just about $200 to implement reference and background checks on each nurse recruited into a healthcare firm. They also show that the implementation of latest technologies such as cloud computing, big data, IT and analytics for quick data sharing improved the performance of organizations as well as minimized the expenditures by through the automation of organizational tasks (Sumner et al., 2012). According to (Khoumbati et al., 2005) more than 850,000 incidents and medical errors occur every year. In the same way, more than 60 persons die daily in UK hospitals because of medical errors. The research has shown that the majority of the errors take place because of the limited capabilities of information technology structure in healthcare organizations. Some of the instances of these errors can be, doctors cannot make correct judgment or inappropriate medications are given to patients or, significant information cannot be delivered or retrieved. It all happens due to ineffective implementation of IT applications. In this scenario, analytics, cloud computing, and big data based solutions can be implemented to minimize the rate of errors (Khoumbati et al., 2005). The Concept of Competition Though, competition does not originate from the truth that a particular healthcare organization or has implemented these technologies to provide health care services. However, once an organization appropriately implemented these technologies, the tasks that the health care firm can carry out with these technologies, both inside its premises and between providers firms can offer it a competitive edge over other firms. In this scenario, healthcare employees can influence the power of these technologies and build a competitive edge through groups of knowledge workers (Richards et al., 2012; Kumar et al., 2011). Conclusion and Recommendations This paper has presented a detailed analysis of different IT tools and applications. Basically, this paper has focused on big data, analytics, and cloud computing in the context of the healthcare industry. This paper has discussed various advantages of these technologies by supporting them through existing literature. It is clear from the discussion that IT, big data, analytics and cloud computing are already being extensively utilized in the healthcare industry. The research has shown that their role will further grow in the coming years. However, the implementation of these technologies alone does not ensure the success of a healthcare firm as we have discussed many cases in which IT implementation caused deaths of many people due to errors. So in this scenario, effective knowledge and experience is required to make this implementation a success. Healthcare firms should consult literature and latest emerging trends to get insights of these technologies. References Akbar, A.A., 2003. ‘Pay-per-use’ Concept in Healthcare: A Grounded Theory Perspective. 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