Big Data Analytics in Healthcare

The pace of both digital innovation and technology disruption is refining the healthcare industry at an exponential rate. The large volume of healthcare data continues to mount every second, making it harder and very difficult to find any form of useful information. Recently, big data is shifting the traditional way of data delivery into valuable insights using big data analytics method. Big data analytics provides a lot of benefits in the healthcare sector to detect critical diseases at the initial stage and deliver better healthcare services to the right patient at the right time so that it improves the quality of life care. Big data analytics tools play an essential role to analyze and integrate large volumes of structured, semi-structured and unstructured vital data rapidly produced by the various clinical, hospitals, other social web sources and medical data lakes. However, there are several issues to be addressed in the current health data analytics platforms that offer technical mechanisms for data collection, aggregation, process, analysis, visualization, and interpretation. Due to lack of detailed study in the previous literature, this article inspects the promising field of big data analytics in healthcare. This article examines the unique characteristics of big data, big data analytical tools, different phases followed by the healthcare economy from data collection to the data delivery stage. Further, this article briefly summarizes the open research challenges with feasible findings, and then finally offers the conclusion.