Healthcare IT Terms
What is Big Data?
Data has made an impact everywhere as computers have grown faster and more powerful, is becoming a major factor in healthcare. The three main characteristics of big data – volume, velocity and variety – increasingly challenge healthcare organizations as EHRs, financial systems,and imaging systems spew out ever more data. Population health management requires the capability to risk-stratify populations, track and intervene with patients, and predict which patients will get sicker. To do that, organizations must aggregate, normalize and analyze a wide variety of data across many care settings. The advent of genomic sequencing and personalized medicine is starting to add a new level of complexity and giant data sets that only big data techniques are capable of addressing.