Information Networks in the Healthcare Industry
https://ehrintelligence.com/news/achieving-a-network-of-networks-with-health-data-standardization
Big data has rapidly revolutionized many industries, transforming the ways in which products and services are developed to enhance user experiences. The importance of big data in the healthcare industry, however, has yet to be tapped into. Big data can truly transform and improve the healthcare sector if utilized properly. Indeed, even at the best medical facilities, patients continuously fall victim to numerous medical errors, whether that be misdiagnosis, wrong prescriptions, or undetectable infections. According to Healthcare IT News, 400,000 people in the US alone die from preventable medical errors annually[1]. By accessing and analyzing large healthcare datasets, some of the industry’s biggest problems can be approached in an efficient and successful manner.
In her article Achieving a Network-of-Networks with Health Data Standardization, Kate Monica shines light onto the concept of a network-of-networks within the healthcare industry, which would essentially link “all participating healthcare organizations together through common standards to enable cross-organization exchange”, allowing easy access to big data across the sector through a large undirected graph connecting the organizations. Such organizations would share data through their interconnected components, functioning in ways similar to the web. This will go long ways in impacting the industry, including reducing malpractice and medical errors within the sector, as well as spearheading artificial intelligence technology, which may help physicians prevent misdiagnosis by using cloud-based data.
[1] Brannan, Darin. “Curbing Medical Errors With the Cloud”. Healthcare IT News. https://www.healthcareitnews.com/blog/curbing-medical-errors-cloud