Challenges of Big Data in Healthcare Informatics and Analytics Essay
When you wake in the morning, you may reach for your cell phone to reply to a few text or email messages that you missed overnight. On your drive to work, you may stop to refuel your car. Upon your arrival, you might swipe a key card at the door to gain entrance to the facility. And before finally reaching your workstation, you may stop by the cafeteria to purchase a coffee.
From the moment you wake, you are in fact a data-generation machine. Each use of your phone, every transaction you make using a debit or credit card, even your entrance to your place of work, creates data. It begs the question: How much data do you generate each day? Many studies have been conducted on this, and the numbers are staggering: Estimates suggest that nearly 1 million bytes of data are generated every second for every person on earth. Challenges of Big Data in Healthcare Informatics and Analytics Essay
As the volume of data increases, information professionals have looked for ways to use big data—large, complex sets of data that require specialized approaches to use effectively. Big data has the potential for significant rewards—and significant risks—to healthcare. In this Discussion, you will consider these risks and rewards.
To Prepare:
Post:
A description of at least one potential benefit of using big data as part of a clinical system and explain why. Then, describe at least one potential challenge or risk of using big data as part of a clinical system and explain why. Propose at least one strategy you have experienced, observed, or researched that may effectively mitigate the challenges or risks of using big data you described. Be specific and provide examples.
Big Data Risks and Rewards
Big data is important in healthcare settings and ensures information from patients is captured for better service delivery. An important benefit of big data in clinical systems includes improving research. Through big data medical research is able to achieve sufficient data from which different studies can be conducted. This includes making inferences and coming up with hypotheses about diverse clinical issues and then venturing into research to unravel important aspects of healthcare. With medical research, there is the possibility of achieving breakthroughs that will impact greatly on saving lives (Batko, 2022). Additionally, this will help in saving treatment costs since evidence-based strategies for managing illnesses will be updated. Challenges of Big Data in Healthcare Informatics and Analytics Essay
On the contrary, some challenges come with big data in clinical settings. For instance, data privacy and security continue to be a huge obstacle to big data management. This is because there are many avenues where phishing and data mining are carried out which might lead to the leaking of patients’ and hospitals’ sensitive data. There exist many data vulnerabilities which may compromise the effectiveness of care delivery (Awrahman, et al., 2022). This is because, when fraudsters get access to patients and healthcare data they can manipulate it and use it against such facilities and others to steal money and important details from care facilities and individuals.
An important strategy for mitigating the risk of big data is through training and educating care providers. This involves training them about the nature and the extent of big data. This role can be adequately taken up by nurse informatics that will be mandated to educate and train others about the optimum ways of managing big data (Galetsi, 2019). This includes securing computers using strong passwords and being sensitive to malware and other cyber-attacks that may lead to loss of such data. Challenges of Big Data in Healthcare Informatics and Analytics Essay
References
Awrahman, B. J., Aziz Fatah, C., & Hamaamin, M. Y. (2022). A Review of the Role and Challenges of Big Data in Healthcare Informatics and Analytics. Computational intelligence and neuroscience, 2022, 5317760. https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/5317760
Batko, K., & Ślęzak, A. (2022). The use of Big Data Analytics in healthcare. Journal of big data, 9(1), 3. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40537-021-00553
Galetsi, P., Katsaliaki, K., & Kumar, S. (2019). Values, challenges and future directions of big data analytics in healthcare: A systematic review. Social science & medicine (1982), 241, 112533 Challenges of Big Data in Healthcare Informatics and Analytics Essay