The main focus of my project is Big Data, and I have realized not all of my readers or people in general know what Big Data really is, so I think in this post I will explain it in the context of my second week.
Big Data is essentially just a large amount of information that we can store electronically now using the latest technology. This is data stored about an insane number of individuals or a very high number of data points surrounding a certain topic. In my field this is going to be genomes and their attached clinical data, tweets and the sentiment of their contents, as well as the different drug purchase transactions for the hospitals Dignity Health is connected with. We can analyze these data using software to draw conclusions that we could never before when we couldn't even handle this much data. Imagine trying to cross reference hundreds of thousands of health records to see which gene will lead to a disease in 20 years by hand, impossible. Now, we can create programs that will sift through the data and allow us to find what is important and do the thinking, offloading the time-consumig labour onto the computer. This is the power of technology and Big Data, it is emerging now as one of the strongest tools of our time. With Big Data, we can improve the lives of people and provide companies with feedback or information they never could have hoped to gather before, and at Dignity Health they are vying to be on the forefront of Big Data science.
Is Dignity Health one of the few companies that is using Big Data in healthcare or is it a common occurrence?
ReplyDeleteBig Data is an exploding field and many different institutions and companies have began to do work in Big Data since it is so powerful. Dignity Health has a very strong and creative team working bring Big Data into the ways they can improve patient care.
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