By Healthcare Facilities Today

A survey from the eHealth Initiative and the College of Health Information Management Executives found that nearly 80 percent of providers feel leveraging big data is important for their organizations, and 84 percent feel that doing so is a significant challenge for their organization, according to an article on the Healthcare Technology Online website.

A recent article on Salon.com also talks about the improvements that big data is making in healthcare. "Where big data comes in is gathering all this information together in one place, sometimes from many different data warehouses, and using it to gain insights into how our health care system can be better," according to Salon.com.  "Want to know which drugs are least likely to have side effects? Which individual doctors have the best outcomes? Which procedures are most cost-effective? Big data could answer these questions and more."

According to the article, there are three ways in which big data is “revolutionizing” healthcare:

• To identify patients at high-risk for certain medical conditions before major problems occur.

• T  increase the quality of care received by patients by creating clinical decision support systems that help them identify errors before they are made

• Saving almost half a trillion dollars by reducing duplicative and unnecessary testing

Read the article.