Fusion Analytics World research finding: Big data healthcare market is estimated to grow from $10bn in 2016 to reach $27.6bn by 2021 at a robust CAGR of 22.3%.

The past several years has observed huge advances in the quantity of data we regularly generate and collect in healthcare sector, as well as our ability to use technology to analyse and make sense out of it. Big data has been predominantly utilized to improve quality of life, cure diseases, predict epidemics and escape avoidable deaths. The current initiative is driven towards picking up warning signs of serious illness in a patient as early as possible thereby reducing cost of treatment and any serious threat to health.

Technology has been key and with the growth of smart devices including smartphones, they will continue to advance & integrate big data & artificial intelligence to the limit of helping individuals self-diagnose. Today, data is being gushed from all sources be it social media, EMR, mobile apps, fitness tracker or various sensors. There has been a huge initiative to completely digitize patient healthcare records.

In future there is scope for big data contribution towards, drug and vaccine development, better ways to better identify patients at risk, better defining patient satisfaction parameters, insurance reimbursement models etc.

2 key challenges to the adaptation of big data in the healthcare sector are:

• Lack of robust, integrated security around the entire architecture considering the privacy and security that is associated with patient data
• Technical expertise to handle such voluminous and every growing data