A Review on Big Data Practices in Healthcare

In recent years, there has been a rapid advancement in the healthcare sector. A major part of this development is possible due to the availability of electronic health records for the patients. Traditionally, the healthcare system used to consist of health records which were handwritten by doctors and other specialists and the medical history of the patients were filed up and they were kept either with the patients or at the hospital. This method not only required a huge amount of manual work and time but also resulted in extensive usage of papers. Thus, an enormous volume of data was generated that was physically present on paper. Simultaneously, with the advancements in the field of computer science, we are able to store the medical record as electrical health records. Also, with the help of clinical analytics, we now have various models and algorithms for storing and computing a huge amount of data and gain certain insights from them. This is known as big data. And healthcare, being an information-rich enterprise, a lot of big data applications can be used here. In this paper, we discuss the different frameworks that are used to store such data and, various methods used to predict certain diseases at an early stage. Such predictive diagnosis will help in cost reduction and can be lifesaving in certain cases.