Big Data analytics offers a world of opportunity for Healthcare industry in terms of better research, improved patient care and greater efficiency in the overall delivery of healthcare services. However it is important that we don’t rush into big data initiatives without understanding each healthcare provider’s unique requirements and take into consideration the available data based on regulatory provisions of the healthcare industry.

Recently Booz Allen Hamilton’s Steven Escaravage and Joachim Roski wrote about this in detail in the blog post here.

They have tried to uncover certain best practices to be followed and pitfalls that IT teams might face while developing Big Data solutions for the healthcare providers.

Some of the key points they have underlined include:

• Accumulate the “correct” data for the project: It has been observed that while embarking on a big data initiative, organizations look for easily accessible data and get on in the hurry of building a solution. This approach might only provide partial value and limit the intelligence that can be derived from data. It is hence important that high impact data sources should be scoured for highly relevant data which can improve the quality of the big data solution.
• Ensure that initial solution phase has a wider application in the industry: Organizations build pilot solutions to meet their immediate challenges which might be computationally intensive or quite specific to their needs. The problem with such a beginning is that it is hard to spur immediate transformational change in the entire organization or other departments. Instead projects should be built on problems which have wider applicability and can be more easily comprehended.
• Don’t start the entire initiative with a pre decided solution: The IT team and the subject matter experts should be provided with access to the entire data available and they’d decide as and how unexpected patterns are revealed from it. Hence utilizing BI and big data reports, the basis for the solution to be built can be described.

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