Healthy data: How big data will transform the patient journey
And those footprints, or digital health records, are getting bigger. In doctors’ surgeries, clinics and hospitals, isolated silos of digital data are growing at an increasing rate.
The situation has inspired the healthcare sector to find ways of liberating this information to improve decision-making and the quality patient care.
According to Dr. David Dembo, GE Healthcare’s General Manager, Healthcare IT, Australia and New Zealand, connecting the data silos will create a more sustainable system.
“We have to make sure the datasets stand up [to scrutiny] and we act early,” he said during a panel at GE’s At Work 2013 event in Sydney.
The challenge now is finding ways to securely and efficiently share the wealth of digital information already captured by primary care providers over the past 20 years.
In one example, Dr. Louise Schaper, CEO, Health Informatics Society of Australia said digital technologies such as home-based sensor networks and personal healthcare monitors can improve treatment methods for people with Parkinson’s disease.
Instead of infrequent testing at a clinical site, home-based systems can collect data from the patient every day. “A smart algorithm can monitor it and alert the right individual,” she said.
Positive outcomes such as this are driving the use of digital technologies and big data within healthcare to help tackle massive inefficiencies and rising costs.
Australia spends approximately $121 billion on healthcare annually, with approximately 70 per cent of that money devoted to people with chronic illnesses. At the same time, the sector is highly fragmented across a variety of healthcare providers, governments, and allied health organisations.
“We have inherited a reactive health system that deals with people in crisis,” explained Dr. Dembo. “It’s inefficient and expensive.”
With costs rising each year, the sector’s transformation challenge includes moving from crisis management mode to proactive prevention strategies.
According to Professor Louise Ryan, School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney, change will come when big data sets are analysed at the population level.
She used clinical trials as an analogy. Value is created when intelligent ways to collect data are designed and then make it broadly available. “You have to find a way to make the entire healthcare system a giant clinical trial,” Professor Ryan said.
The ultimate goal is to improve decision-support systems and provide better patient care. And one way that may improve in the future is by opening up secure, de-identified sources of healthcare data to anyone on the internet with a credit card, according to Dr. Schaper.
“People are willing to share that [healthcare] data with people who could use that data,” she said. “There are a lot of people talking about open data.”
The journey to embrace digital healthcare is an urgent one, added Michael Ackland, President and CEO, GE Healthcare ANZ. “Healthcare has been one of the last bastions to embrace data and digital technology,” he said.