Posted by Joachim Roski on December 19, 2014
Earlier this month, I gave a lecture about big data as a part of the Healthy Health Policy Lunch & Lecture Series sponsored by the Office of the President, the Office of Health Policy and Legislative Affairs, and the Center for Rehabilitation Research Using Large Datasets at the University of Texas. My discussion focused on the connection between millions to billions of records, countless sources of information and an ever-growing need to perform sophisticated analytics encompass what big data is all about.
Key elements of big data include:
- Volume: Massive amounts of data that strain the capacity and capability of traditional data storage, management and retrieval systems such as data warehouses
- Variety: Big-data approaches enable the efficient linking and analyses of disparately formatted data (numbers, text, images, etc.) to answer particular operational, business or research questions
- Velocity: Big-data infrastructure makes it possible to manage data more flexibly and quickly than has been the case
For example, the amount of data available is exploding at an exponential rate. At the current rate of growth of digital information, it is estimated that by 2020, health care data worldwide will amount to 25,000 petabytes — 50 times what it is now.
The value of big data cannot be overstated as it has the potential to generate approximately $300 billion annually in the health care sector alone. From driving efficiency, ensuring quality, lowering health care costs and increasing customer satisfaction, big data is the next frontier. But how do we harness the potential benefits and value of big data in the health care sector? The answer lies in smart IT infrastructure such as data lakes and data clouds designed to make big data analytics possible.
We are already bringing big data innovations to our clients; for example:
- Using big data and sophisticated systems dynamic modeling, we are helping a large health care organization on the West Coast plan for the future design of its healthcare system. We’re tackling complex questions such as: what clinical services should be delivered to which patients with changing demographics and disease burden in what locations with what staff, equipment, resource allocations, etc.? Our big data solutions allow our clients to visualize the impact of these potential decisions and optimize the value delivered to their market.
- We are supporting a large, national health system to allow its patients to stream patient generated data captured through sensors, mobile applications and direct entry into patient health records. Using big data computing solutions we enable immediate feedback to both clinicians and patients supporting care and self-management to improve outcomes and reduce unnecessary expenditures.
- We support large pharmaceutical firms to improve drug manufacturing by analyzing tens of thousands of raw materials and manufacturing processes to dramatically increase yield of effective product and reduce waste, resulting in millions of dollars saved.
- We are supporting a large national regulatory agency in ingesting and analyzing highly diverse data streams collected by multiple organizations around the country for an integrated view, enabling the agency to act in real-time on integrated data for better decision-making.
Booz Allen continues to expand its expertise to forge the path forward in the area of big data analytics. It is because of our pioneering vision and expertise in translating our clients’ goals into action that we continuously are called upon as leaders in the big data field. For more information, you may be interested in an article that I co-authored with my colleague Booz Allen Vice President Tim Andrews, "Creating Value in Health Care through Data: Opportunities and Implications" which appeared in the July 2014 edition of the Health Affairs journal.
