Big data in healthcare: Challenges and opportunities

Mobile phones, sensors, patients, hospitals, researchers, providers and organizations are nowadays, generating huge amounts of healthcare data. The real challenge in healthcare systems is how to find, collect, analyze and manage information to make people´s lives healthier and easier, by contributing not only to understand new diseases and therapies but also to predict outcomes at earlier stages and make real-time decisions. In this paper, we explain the potential benefits of big data to healthcare and explore how it improves treatment and empowers patients, providers and researchers. We also describe the ability of reality mining in collecting large amounts of data to understand people´s habits, detect and predict outcomes, and illustrate the benefits of big data analytics through five effective new pathways that could be adopted to promote patients´ health, enhance medicine, reduce cost and improve healthcare value and quality. We cover some big data solutions in healthcare and we shed light on implementations, such as Electronic Healthcare Record (HER) and Electronic Healthcare Predictive Analytics (e-HPA) in US hospitals. Furthermore, we complete the picture by highlighting some challenges that big data analytics faces in healthcare.