How Big Data is going to Change the Medical World in Near Future?

What comes in your mind in first place when you visit to a healthcare professional or doctor? Well, whenever we visit a doctor or go to a hospital, we have faith that healthcare professionals are going to treat us according to the certified scientific methods or evidence-based medicine.

It simply means they are going to prescribe drugs or choose treatment methods which have been proven successful in medical research.

The concept of ‘evidence-based medicine’ is much older; however, it dates back to 1990s. As early as 1940s the controlled trials were regularly being carried out and clinical knowledge as well as specialty was already being circulated in medical textbooks and journals long before that.

Clinical studies or trials are all about carrying our research into particular disease or condition, and different treatment methods that may cure the illness or ease the symptoms altogether. The purpose of this research is to find out which treatment is suitable for which ailment and in which types of patients. All over the world, evidence-based medicine is the proven standard for the provision in the sector of healthcare; however, in the era where big data Hadoop is changing everything, this is likely to get changed as well.

Clinical trials in the age of Hadoop:

Clinical trials are based on testing new treatments in modular basis, for example in small groups at first. It focuses on analysing how well the treatment works and to know whether it has any side effects or not.

If a trial is successful, it is conducted on larger groups of people. Typically, the trial will involve comparing the new methodology to other treatments by dividing patients into different groups, each going through a different treatment. This process is called randomisation, where patients are separated into various groups in a random manner.

How big data helps in Medical Trials?

In order to protect the participants and enhance reliability, clinical trials need to go through rigorous scientific standards. But, it can’t be said that there involves no risk of methodological flaws, or that the small groups used in those trials always generalise well outside of a specific research. This is where big data comes handy or comes for rescue.

By mining the bulks of practice-based medical/clinical data, that means the records of the patients, based on which patient has which condition or which treatment is proving to be successful, medical professionals can learn a lot about the right way of taking care of their patients.

Let’s take an example of a California-based company, Apixio, which has firmly set its sights on helping healthcare professionals to learn from practice-based evidence to individually tailor care. According to the firm, we can get more knowledge from the practice of medicine and improve our approach to medical care. This gets people closer to a learning healthcare system. The firm focuses on what actually works and what not by taking evidences from the real-world data.

If we analyse then we’ll find that around 80% of medical and clinical data related to patients is retrieved from unstructured data, for example from written consultant notes, physician notes, pathology results, radiology notes, discharge from a hospital and so on.

This unstructured data can be mined easily to learn about giving the better treatment to the people. Although there have been electronic healthcare records around in various formats, but as they were not designed for analysis, they were of not much use. Hence, first one should extract data from various sources like government medical records, hospitals, GP surgeries and so on, then this information has to be turned into such a way that computer can analyse it easily.

This data can be analysed at a particular level to create a patient model and it can be combined across the population to get larger insights around the cure, treatment patterns and more.

Hence, with big data Hadoop, it’s not hard to see a future that combines bother evidence-based and practice-based medical methodologies to provide best treatments to the patients. Big data undoubtedly is going to transform the whole medical world. It’s likely to help healthcare professionals prescribe more accurate medicines and take care of their patients in a better way.