Affordable Care Act (ACA) which was rolled out in 2010 is by far the biggest healthcare event. Nonetheless, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act which was rolled out in 2009 was also equally important which led to the adoption of meaningful use of health information technology. Also, during this time $20 billion were set aside for the doctors and hospitals as an incentive who implemented the electronic health record systems and these systems give rise to several healthcare trends in effect today.
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ACA also give rise to some positive trends such as healthcare providers began to use analytics to detect diseases and prevent fraud, abuse and improve health management of population and many high scale analytics system are in place today.
Consumerization and venture-capital funded digital health startups are today’s biggest healthcare trend as they are giving very close competition to the traditional healthcare systems by interrupting and disrupting their markets. And since these startups are focused on leveraging the power and reach of the analytics they are also able to offer some value added services and eventually hospitals are now engaged in analyzing the data from services such as Yelp, Healtgrades and ZocDoc to better understand their customers.
With players like Yelp entering in this is helping the patients as they are addressing one of the patient’s unanswered needs: hospital’s rating and the reasons behind it and it is only a matter of time before third party like yelp will began to provide valuable insights regarding the critical medical treatment decision.
In order for healthcare services to align with the emerging healthcare trends there are essentially three things which can be done.
Traditionally healthcare industry has not been so keen in investing very much in technology and was even last to adopt the advance data analytics. With the data explosion, enterprises are required to upgrade their IT environments, explore cloud based solutions for scalability and need to integrate the big data analytics into their ever day workflow and operations.
Examples from retail and banking industry can quickly become lessons for the healthcare industry. For example, Internet of Things is helping the retailers in optimizing their consumer targeting and their expenditures for campaign. By using the data from smart wearable devices healthcare industry can easily understand their patients better and can improve their diagnosis and take better decisions in their treatment methodologies. This can be particularly helpful in medical emergencies.
Related: Big Data: Is it your Solution to Improve the Customer Service?
New business models and non-traditional players can help the health care industry in improving their quality of care. One such example includes the partnerships which the pharmaceutical companies are forming with the Silicon Valley companies. In some cases buyers are even donating their health and genetic data and this is very significant as it clearly demonstrates that partners form different fields can leverage the big data analytics for the good of the healthcare industry.
