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Big Data Analytics in Healthcare

Conference Paper · December 2018

DOI: 10.1109/ICoAC44903.2018.8939061

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 Big Data Analytics in Healthcare
M. Ambigavathi 1
1 2
Research Scholar, Department of ECE
CEG Campus, Anna University
Chennai, India
ambigaindhu8@gmail.com
Abstract—The pace of both digital innovation and technology
disruption is refining the healthcare industry at an exponential
rate. The large volume of healthcare data continues to mount
every second, making it harder and very difficult to find any
form of useful information. Recently, big data is shifting the
traditional way of data delivery into valuable insights using
big data analytics method. Big data analytics provides a lot of
benefits in the healthcare sector to detect critical diseases at
the initial stage and deliver better healthcare services to the
right patient at the right time so that it improves the quality of
life care. Big data analytics tools play an essential role to
analyze and integrate large volumes of structured, semi-
structured and unstructured vital data rapidly produced by the
various clinical, hospitals, other social web sources and
medical data lakes. However, there are several issues to be
addressed in the current health data analytics platforms that
offer technical mechanisms for data collection, aggregation,
process, analysis, visualization, and interpretation. Due to lack
of detailed study in the previous literature, this article inspects
the promising field of big data analytics in healthcare. This
article examines the unique characteristics of big data, big data
analytical tools, different phases followed by the healthcare
economy from data collection to the data delivery stage.
Further, this article briefly summarizes the open research
challenges with feasible findings, and then finally offers the
conclusion.
Keywords—Big data; Big data analytics; Big data analytics
tools; Healthcare applications
I. INTRODUCTION
In today’s digital era, the increasing rates of chronic
diseases, increased population growth, inability to process and
get valuable information from diverse health-related data sets
that are some of the main reasons for adopting a new
technology in healthcare sectors to facilitate and provide an
evidence-based medicine (EBM) [1-3]. Big data is an
emerging technology to modernize the conventional health
care system and move the current healthcare industry forward
on several fronts [4]. The data from different sources such as
mobile phones, body area sensors, patients, hospitals,
researchers, healthcare providers, and organizations are
currently generating the immense volume of medical data [5].
978-1-7281-0353-2/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
269
D. Sridharan 2
Professor, Department of ECE
CEG Campus, Anna University
Chennai, India
sridhar@annauniv.edu
The amassed data from various sources will be in different
forms including electronic health records (EHRs), medical
imaging (MI), genomic sequencing (GS), clinical records
(CR), pharmaceutical research (PR), wearable, and medical
devices (MD). These big health data are specially stored in a
medical server (MS), clinical database (CDB), and other
clinical data repositories (CDR) for next level analysis [6]-[7].
The storage infrastructures are primarily used to store, process,
analyze, manage and retrieve the huge amounts of data in
order to make it easier for the people. Therefore, it is not only
providing the information to understand the symptoms, illness,
and treatments but also to alert, predict outcomes at initial
stages and make the right decisions.
Big Data Analytics tool is a new paradigm, mainly
designed to analyze, manage and precisely extract the useful
information from large volumes of data sets that are very
similar to a particular patient in a very short time [8]. Some of
the common software tools are used as part of this advanced
analytics strategy such as predictive analytics, data mining,
text analytics and statistical analysis. Moreover, this modern
technological based analytics method transforms the
healthcare industry entirely to take the right decision for the
right patient at the right time [9]. Since, these factors are
highly motivated us to survey the distinct characteristics of big
data, life cycle of big data analytics, big health data analytical
tools, and recent open research challenges of the big data
analytics in healthcare. The main contributions of this paper
are summarized as follows:
x To study the distinct characteristics of big data
analytics in healthcare
x To study the various big data analytics tools and
platforms used to improve the quality of patient care
x To present the different levels of big data analytics
and their key components
x To describe the open research challenges faced by the
healthcare industry and feasible solutions with future
directions
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows:
Section 2 provides the unique characteristics of big data
analytics in healthcare. Section 3 describes the different
phases of big data analytics and their key components. The big
data analytics platforms and tools used in healthcare sectors
are listed in section 4. Open research challenges with possible
solutions in healthcare are summarized in section 5. Finally,
this article is concluded with future directions in section 6.
II. UNIQUE CHARACTERISTICS OF BIG HEALTH DATA
This section describes the evolution of V’s and
characteristics of big data in the healthcare applications. The
characteristics of big health data are mainly associated with
various issues namely capture, cleaning, curation, integration,
storage, processing, indexing, search, sharing, transfer,
mining, analysis, and visualization. Several researchers at
different periods are recommended a wide range of V’s such
as volume, variety, velocity, veracity, validity for different
applications [10-13]. Some of the researchers also suggested
that it will be increased up to 100 V’s in the near future for an
efficient big data analytics. Further, the other important
characteristics of big data in the healthcare application are
summarized as follows [14]:
A. Value
To extract the valuable information from the stored
medical data by using analytics tools and techniques. For
instance, this type of analytics helps medical researchers to get
new insights and provide ever-increasing value for patients as
more data becomes available. Moreover, the true value
depends on the opinion of the patients and sometimes the
collective information have different values that will lead to
more risk.
B. Variability
The health-related data collected from various data sources
that changes at different time intervals. If the data variety
changes during the processing and lifecycle, then
inconsistency will also be increased in the context of providing
unexpected, hidden and valuable information.
C. Venue
Generally, the big health data is collected in a distributed
manner. The heterogeneous amount of data amassed from
various data sources like healthcare organizations, medical
practitioners, and individuals, medical databases via different
platforms that may require different access, location and
format to store or process the medical data.
D. Vocabulary
The different data validation and modelling approaches are
required to describe the data structure including schema, data
models, semantics, ontologies, taxonomies, and other
framework-based metadata. Since the data scientist needs to
focus on the different validation techniques to tackle the
variety of problems in the healthcare applications.
E. Vagueness
The gathered data is often very unclear regardless of how
much data is available. So, it provides confusion over the
meaning of big health data and which analytical tools will be
used in spite of data availability.
270
F. Valor
Based on the incoming medical data, the data scientist
must handle or tackle the big problems.
G. Vane
After processing the data, a data scientist must remove the
health-related data that are least important or suitable and help
to make the right decision making.
H. Vanilla
Even though, the simple analytical model is constructed
with rigor that can able to provide useful value.
I. Vantage
The big data allows patients or physicians a privileged
view of the complex medical systems.
J. Varifocal
The big data analytics allows the patients to view an
infinite number of insightful information, which is very close,
transitional, and inaccessible to the patients or physicians in
order to make the right suggestions.
K. Varmint
The amount of medical data gets bigger, thus may
gradually increase the software bugs.
L. Vanish
This indicates how patients interact with the data scientist,
doctors, and other analysts on the subject of diagnosis matter.
M. Versed
To resolve all the various problems faced during the data
analysis, they should often need to have more knowledge in
the mathematics, statistics, programming, databases, etc.
N. Vastness
The bigness of big health data is accelerating with the
recent advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) in the
healthcare industry.
O. Vault
With many healthcare applications based on large and
often sensitive data sets, data security is progressively more
important.
III. VARIOUS PHASES OF BIG DATA ANALYTICS
This section discusses the key roles and its five different
phases [15-16] of big data analytics in the evolution of
healthcare applications and research. It is specially used to
disease exploration with the support of analytical tools and
techniques so as to collect, process, analyze, inspect and
manage the large volumes of structured, unstructured and semi-
structured data created by current healthcare systems or
organizations. The various components involved in the big
health data analytics from the data mining to the knowledge
discovery process is summarized as follows:
A. Phase 1: Data collection, accumulation, and storage
The first phase is mainly used to acquire the heterogeneous
volume of healthcare data from the billions of various sources
(i.e. internal and external, respectively). The accumulated data
may be in different formats and types as already mentioned in
section 3. Then, it will be transferred to the system for analysis
or either it is stored in databases or data warehouse. In fact,
there are also a lot of challenges for handling healthcare data
due to lack of data protocols, data standards, scalability, and
data privacy issues and so on. Besides, it is very difficult to
find out the right metadata to describe what kind of health data
is stored and how it is measured. However, this metadata
acquisition system that depicts and gives information about
other types of medical data with the purpose of knowledge
discovery and identification but also can increase the burden
of analyzing the metadata. Another important issue is data
cleaning. If the stored information is not useful, then it can be
passed through the entire data analysis phase and increased the
processing error.
B. Phase 2: Data cleaning, extraction, and classification
This second phase is particularly used to extract the
medical information and stored on a single database. The data
cleaning is the process of detecting and removing inaccurate
health-related records. Often, the collected information from
sensors, physician’s prescription, medical image data, and
social networking data will not be incorrect format since the
data needs to be in a structured format for performing the
suitable analysis. The continuous challenge during this phase
is removing and adding the missed values. For instance, the
received data may also include medical images (i.e. MRI, CT,
PET/CT, and Ultrasound, respectively) and in such a case the
data retrieval is often highly application dependent and very
difficult to filter based on their structure. These data should be
classified in the form of structured, semi-structured and
unstructured data to perform the meaningful analysis.
C. Phase 3: Data integration, aggregation, and
representation
The source information for data aggregation process may
instigate from internal and external health databases. This
phase uses the amassed voluminous and variety of medical
data for aggregation, which can be effectively used for data
analysis. The main purpose is to get detailed information about
particular health records based on specific variables such as
the date when it is created, the similarity between other
records, critical status, patient’s name, history of past readings
etc. Finally, the aggregated information is transferred to the
hospitals, data scientist, researchers as well as to local, state,
other remote and government healthcare agencies. Basically,
the health-related records are very sensitive in nature. Since
the integration of dynamic medical information with already
existing static information is not an easy task in the real-time
environment. At the same time, healthcare professionals want
the patient’s information to be accurate and up-to-date in order
to treat the diseases. Furthermore, the representation of
meaningful data should be manageable in size, even after the
data reduction, noise removal as well as the important
271
characteristics of the original health information should not be
changed. Therefore, the possibility of selecting a data
representation model may result in more meaningful
information.
D. Phase 4: Data modeling, analysis and query processing
The data modeling phase is used to process the complex
medical information into an easily understandable form using
diagrams, text, and symbols. It is mostly used to view the
identical health-related data and ensure that all processes,
entities, relationships, and data flows have been identified.
There are several different data modeling approaches used
including conceptual, physical and logical levels. Since, it
ensures data consistency in original values, semantics, and
security while ensuring the quality of the data. The analysis of
the data is to find useful information from the healthcare data
sets using various analytical methods and technologies such as
using data mining algorithms. One of the crucial problems
with current big data analysis is the lack of ability to use
different database systems together efficiently. However, once
the medical information is integrated and analyzed, the next
step is to query the valuable data. Query processing is a way to
respond to the user level queries. It may be simple or the range
from high-level queries to low-level queries from the
physicians, families or even from individuals regarding their
health status. Base on the complexity of the query, the big data
analyst must select the suitable platform and analysis tools.
E. Phase: 5 Data interpretation, delivery, and feedback
The final phase of big data analytics is data interpretation,
data delivery, and feedback. Data interpretation is very
important after completed all the above processing steps in the
data sets. The interpretation of the healthcare data results
should be very clear. If it is not clear, then the patients or other
healthcare professional cannot understand the interpreted
results provided by the data analyst or decision maker or even
computer systems. Moreover, this interpretation involves
investigating all the assumptions made and retracing the data
analysis. However, a decision-maker has to inspect difficulties
on the many assumptions at various phases of analysis. The
data delivery phase helps to generate health report based on
the previous data model. This model will assist the caregivers
or medical doctors to take the necessary treatment to avoid any
further complications. At the last phase, the feedback will be
obtained from the patients and decision makers in the context
of improving the quality of patient’s care.
IV. BIG DATA ANALYTICS TOOLS
The process of vast quantities of healthcare information
using traditional data processing techniques and tools are very
difficult in real-time [17-18]. The various big data analytical
tools for data analysis and their functionalities are summarized
in Table.1.There are hundreds of big analytical tools are
introducing for data analysis today. This analysis process helps
to inspect, clean, transform, and model the data in order to
extract useful information, suggest the best possible solutions,
and support right decision making in the critical situations [19-
20].
TABLE I. DIFFERENT BIG DATA ANALYTICS TOOLS
Big data analytical
S.No Functionalities
tools
Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is
the primary data storage file system that
manages data processing and storage for big
Hadoop Distributed health data applications running in clustered
1 Avro is a popular data serialization and
File System medical systems. It divides the large amount
of healthcare data set into smaller one and
scattered it across the different medical
servers.
MapReduce is a high level parallel
programming model which divides a large
2 MapReduce task into smaller tasks and provides the final
results. It keeps tracking the process of each
server or node at the same time.
Complex event processing is recently
introduced in the hospitals to detect the new
Complex Event
3 pattern of the patient from the current
Processing
changing event and also predict the
associated events in the real time.
Text mining tool is used in different ways to
analyze the clinical records of the patient and
4 Text Mining physician responses from the hospitals in
order to take necessary treatment plan for the
patient.
Pig is mostly used to analyze the large
amount of big health data sets (i.e. structured
5 Pig
or unstructured) from various data sources
and store the upshots into the HDFS.
The hive tool is primarily used to manage,
process and organize the huge amount of
healthcare data sets in HDFS. It is located on
6 Hive
top of Hadoop in order to review, query and
analyze the large sets of immutable data
using hive query language (QL).
Jaql is a functional QL and specially used to
perform conversion based analysis (i.e.
transform, grouping and aggregation) on the
7 Jaql
large big health data sets. In order to simplify
the parallel processing, it translates the high-
level queries into low level ones.
Zookeeper has the capability to coordinate
the synchronization process of multiple nodes
in the cluster, send configuration attributes to
8 Zookeeper a particular or all nodes in the cluster, then
elects a leader node among the multiple
nodes, and provides a reliable communication
between and among the nodes in the cluster.
HBase is a typical non-relational database
(i.e. NoSQL) model, which is placed on the
top of HDFS. It distributes huge healthcare
9 HBase data sets under various Hadoop frameworks
and provides the random based healthcare
data access or querying capabilities to the end
users.
Cassandra is also a distributed file system
which is especially designed to handle large
volume of big health data sets across many
10 Cassandra
Hadoop servers. It also guarantees and
performs reliable data service with no single
point of failure.
Oozie is a scalable and reliable workflow
scheduler system to manage Hadoop jobs.
These jobs are triggered by pre-determined
11 Oozie
intervals or healthcare data availability. It is
specified by the Directed Acyclical Graphs
(DAGs) of actions to execute.
272
Solr is a NoSQL database generally used for
providing centralized configuration, highly
12 Apache Solr reliable, fault tolerant, distributed indexing,
load-balanced querying, and self-respond to
failure and more.
Lucene is primarily used for indexing,
analyzing and searching work. It is an open
13 Lucene source and cross platform that supports a
high-performance multi-index search and
information retrieval.
deserialization system in Hadoop systems. It
14 Avro
simplifies the exchange of big health data
between programs written in any language.
Mahout is a declarative machine learning
library tool for distributed big health data
15 Mahout flow system. Recently, samsara is added to
Apache Mahout library for real time
analytics.
YARN is mainly used for monitoring the
Apache Hadoop MapReduce jobs execution, allocating system
16
YARN resources and scheduling tasks to be executed
on different cluster nodes.
Advanced data visualization tool offers more
analytics capabilities and allows patient or
Advanced Data
17 doctors to access the analyzed data and
Visualization
understand the significance of data in eye-
catching and understanding formats.
Presto is a distributed structured query engine
for fast and interactive analytic queries in
contradiction of data of any size (i.e. from
18 Presto gigabytes to petabytes). It can perform data
analytics across different medical servers so
that it combines health related data from
multiple sources.
Vertica is a distributed analytical database
created to work on Hadoop clusters. It is a
very of cost-effective, column oriented
19 Vertica storage platform designed to handle large
volumes of health related data and it enables
very fast patient related query performance in
critical scenarios.
It is a general metric used to take crucial and
data-driven decisions on medical records. It
also helps medical practitioner find to track
Key Performance
20 and refer other doctors through social
Indicators
recommendations and inventions in order to
find out well qualified doctors to be
monitored the patient.
HCatalog is a meta data and table
management tool for Hadoop framework.
Hadoop has the capability to process both
21 HCatalog structured and unstructured medical data and
it can store and share information about
medical data’s structure in the HCatalog in
any format regardless of structure.
Chukwa is a flexible, powerful real time data
collection system for monitoring, displaying
22 Chukwa and analyzing large distributed systems. It is
located on top of the HDFS and MapReduce
framework.
Flume is a data ingestion tool for collecting
aggregating and moving large amounts of
23 Flume
medical records from various data producers
to a Hadoop system.
It is a data management tool for handling
24 Falcon medical data pipelines in Hadoop clusters for
performing the complex processing jobs.
Kafka is a data streaming platform run as a
25 Kafka cluster on one or more medical servers and it
stores streams of medical records. Each
 medical record consists of a key, a value, and
a timestamp.
Accumulo is a fine-grained data access tool
that provides extremely fast access to the
26 Accumulo medical records which are stored in a large
table with billions of rows and millions of
columns down to the individual cell.
This storm tool is primarily designed to
process huge amount of data similar to
27 Storm Hadoop. Since it is a real-time distributed
streaming data framework that has the
capability of highest data ingestion rates.
Atlas is a data governance tool which helps to
gather, process, maintain and exchange the
metadata with other tool within and outside
28 Atlas
of Hadoop stack. This tool offers scalable and
extensible set of core service to form a series
of data properties.
Tez is a framework that is used for
developing high performance batch and
29 Tez interactive big data processing applications in
a real-time. Tez uses a complex directed-
acyclic-graph (DAG) for processing data.
Sqoop is a popular tool designed to import
data between Hadoop and RDBMS servers as
well as export big health data from HDFS to
30 Sqoop
RDBMS so that it can be easily accessed and
used by the Hadoop servers and then upload
it again to the HDFS.
V. OPEN RESEARCH CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS
The big health data faces a lot of issues in each and every
stage of the analytical process. However, it has the great
potential to accelerate the traditional procedures of healthcare
data delivery services.
A. Capturing and cleaning big health data from diverse
sources
The real-time medical data comes from both internal and
external healthcare providers for data analysis. The captured
data sets will be in different formats and in different sizes.
These dirty data can often derail the big data analytics, so the
data sets should be clean, complete, accurate, and in correct
format before forwarding to the multiple medical systems or
physicians [21]. Further, it must require to integrate the
structured, unstructured and semi-structured data by
eliminating disparities and inconsistencies. By this, the data
scientist can able to resolve new errors, eliminate data
inconsistencies, and prevent data loss consistently to exploit big
data properly. The data cleaning tools (i.e. rapid miner,
winepure, open refine, drake, and datawrangler) will must work
with messy data as well as to adapt to current technologies in
order to make the actual data sets faultless, to reduce the time
of processing the raw data sets and to ensure the high levels of
accuracy and integrity in healthcare data warehouses.
B. Maintaining big health data storage and data quality
The massive quantity of data in healthcare sectors is
growing exponentially at a very fast pace. The storage and
quality of the medical data are becoming a real challenge for
doctors, patients and other clinical trials. Some healthcare
providers are no longer able to manage the costs and control
the medical data centers. The data lakes or data warehouses
273
are commonly used to collect, store, and analyze large
volumes of data in various formats. These coarse data from
diverse sources will increase data errors, data duplication and
incorrect data linking that demand the dedicated data cleansing
process [22]. Consequently, the physicians will have to make
decisions based on the more accurate data to the patient. If the
analysed data is not accurate, it will result in ill-advised
decisions that would ultimately be detrimental to the patients.
The high reliance on data quality makes testing a high priority
issue. Subsequently, it requires a lot of resources to guarantee
the accuracy of the information stored. The process of
detecting and correcting the inaccurate, incomplete, inaccurate
medical records from a medical database and then replacing,
modifying, or deleting the coarse data are very time
consuming and thus requires relevant analytical tools to
provide more accuracy over the collected datasets.
C. Converting incomplete big health data into valuable
insights
The large volume of data is rapidly mounted from the
enormous number of sources [23]. If the data is in incomplete
format, the computer systems cannot work more effectively if
they stored multiple items that are not identical in size and
format. Besides, the physicians would not take right decisions
due to incomplete data sets. The data needs to be analysed and
classified by other relevant information such as occupation,
designation must take into account patients for which the
information is not known. For instance, the occupation of the
patient will be considered during the analysis only if the
relevant information is not available to that particular patient.
Otherwise, it will be eliminated with known parameters of the
patient in the analysis process. The health related information
is often collected and scattered across many payors, hospitals,
administrative offices, government agencies, servers and file
cabinets. However, after the data cleansing and error
correction, some incompleteness and errors in data are likely
to remain. These incompleteness and errors must be eliminated
during the data analysis. It is necessary for healthcare
organizations to gain important insights from the big health
data analysis. Therefore, a proper analysis mechanism needs to
be find out useful or valuable insights. Further, if the
incomplete healthcare data sets are bigger and more diverse,
there will be more difficult to incorporate them into an
analytical platform.
D. Scaling up and down of big health data according to
current demand
Unlike other conventional data collections, the big health data
grows and evolves consistently. So, the healthcare
organizations often ignore the fact that the big data volume
and workload grows rapidly. They must create an
infrastructure that simplifies the processing on the fresh
datasets regularly. Recently, many hospitals select the cloud
platforms to store and manage big heath data efficiently by
using computing resources on demand. However, some of the
big data solutions will not perform optimally in the cloud
server. Therefore, the healthcare industry must address this
challenge to scale up and down the medical data sets according
to the doctor’s or patient’s demand. In fact, the introduction of
new processing tools and storing capacities will affect the
actual analytical process. As a result, the complexity and
performance of the systems will directly minimize the scaling
up the big data sets [24]. The next crucial thing is high
velocity and volume data sets requires design of big data
algorithms based on the data growth or any modifications in
the actual data sets. For instance, the integration of data
streams coming from all healthcare sport services and other
relevant data flow can easily reach up to millions of tuples per
second. Moreover, the centralized server cannot process the
entire flows of this scale in real time. Thus, the main challenge
is to build a distributed medical server, where each server is
used to store and view the local data flow. These local views
of the health related data sets must then be aggregated and
transmitted in order to build a global view of the data with an
off-line or online analysis.
E. Making faster and better decisions on timeliness big
health data
The timeliness of data is one of the most important
challenges in healthcare applications such as clinical decision
support, hospitals and caregivers etc. Therefore, the decision
should be simpler, faster and ultimately more accurate because
medical practitioners take decisions based on higher volumes
of cleansed data that are more current and relevant. In some
cases, the doctors may need a very limited report or analytic
query. Data scientist or physicians must give attention to data
and query structure to ensure the best possible results of the
patients. Sometimes, the healthcare datasets contain complex
and varied events, in this case, the data set has to be tuned
without an over searching structure and it needs to convert into
meaningful measures in real time for rapid analysis. Time
delay in processing the complex medical data sets will lead to
less quality patient care [25]. The big data analysts must get
the right medical support for interpreting the results to the
patients after the clinical data is analyzed as right clarification
over the medical report is very essential for making better
decisions. Further, the computer system must need to predict
or suggest the valuable and potential doctors and other
specialists to the user. Moreover, they have to evaluate
multiple spatial proximity queries and locate an exact result
that require a novel indexing mechanism to support such
medical queries. Next, if the data volume is growing rapidly
and then queries provided by the medical practitioners will
have tight response time limits.
F. Securing large voluminous big health data
Once, healthcare organizations have the rights to use big
health data, it provides a wide range of opportunities to take
the right decisions and right therapies. However, it also
involves big risks when it comes to data security and privacy.
Because, the analytical tools used only for analysis, extract,
and utilizes the data from a different variety of health
providers. Further, the volume of more healthcare data
eventually leads to a risk of exposure of the data, making it
274
highly vulnerable. Accordingly, it is very essential for analysts
and data scientists to consider these security issues and deal
with the data in such a way that will not lead to the disruption
of privacy [26-27]. People generate and share personal
healthcare data that are more sensitive and not always be
protected from government regulation. Data security is one of
the primary issues for healthcare organizations, especially in
critical situations including a series of high profile breaches,
hackings, and ransomware events.
The privacy of data is another important concern in the
context of big health data. The management of privacy is fully
based on the technical and a sociological problem. For
instance, an attacker can infer the identity of the query source
from its location information. Even, the patient’s location
information can be tracked through cell towers. Besides, the
sensitive information is more vulnerable to security threats
such as the improper disclosure of patient’s data, unauthorized
use of patient’s data and unauthorized destruction of patient’s
data. There will be an infinite array of vulnerabilities caused
by the fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information (i.e.
phishing attacks). Consequently, healthcare organizations must
need to protect sensitive information by using transmission
security, authentication protocols, and data controls over
access, integrity, and data auditing. The healthcare
organizations must check the security procedures such as
using up-to-date anti-virus software, setting up firewalls,
encrypting sensitive data, and using multi-factor
authentication. The healthcare sector must frequently remind
the critical nature of data security protocols to their clinical
staff members.
G. Collaborating and interacting with the medical practice
A big data analysis system collects input from multiple
patient records, analyze and share the explored results. The
ability to query data is fundamental task for reporting the
outcomes and analytics. Firstly, it must overcome the
interoperability problems that prevent query tools from
accessing the healthcare industry’s entire repository of
information. Many healthcare administrations are using SQL
to hangout into large datasets and relational databases, but it is
only effective mechanism when a patient can first trust the
accuracy, completeness of the results. After the healthcare
providers have done the query process, they must generate a
report to the patient that should be very clear, more accurate
and concise. Poor data will produce suspicious reports at the
end of the analytical process, which can be harmful for
physician who wants to use the report to treat patient [28].
At the point of quality care, a clean and attractive data
visualization (i.e. charts, figures, flowcharts, and callouts)
must require to figure out the reported results so that doctors
can easily absorb the medical information and practice it
appropriately. Since, the healthcare sectors must also consider
good visualization tools including heat maps, bar charts, pie
charts, scatterplots, and histograms to minimize the potential
confusion over the medical reports. The converted graphics
should not be overlapped with text, and not frustrated with low
quality graphics. Thus leading the patients to ignore or
misinterpret healthcare data [29]. Big health dataset is a
dynamic set that will require relatively frequent updates in
order to remain current and relevant. For instance, updates on
the patient vital signs may occur every few seconds and other
updates such as home address, marital status might only occur
a few times during a patient’s entire lifetime.
Only less number of patients are receiving all of their
reports at a single location. It means that sharing sensitive data
with external systems is essential but the healthcare sectors is
currently facing a lot of issues to improve the sharing of
medical data across technical and organizational blocks. The
healthcare industries must consider the advanced tools and
strategies as well as partnerships to make it easier for
physicians or patients to share data easily and securely.
H. Reducing the cost and managing the policy and process
For storing and managing the big heath data sets require
additional cost according to the scale, different resources. The
real challenge starts from acquiring new hardware, paying a
cloud provider, and hiring developers etc. The healthcare
industries will need to spend a lot of expenses to
configuration, maintenance, setup of new software, electricity
and so on. Therefore, the data storage and data process in the
medical database will also be cost-effective. By resorting the
medical data lakes, can provide cheap storage opportunities for
the data sets. The optimization algorithms can also decrease
the computing energy consumption by 5 to 100 times. Further,
the medical data is validated and aggregated, various process
and policy-related issues need to be addressed. These policy
and procedures protect health information and provide access
control, authentication, and security during the data
transmission.
I. Lacking of data scientist, standards and techniques
With the exponential rise of data, a huge demand for big
data scientists and analysts has been created in the healthcare
industry. It is important for healthcare organizations to appoint
a data scientist having relevant skills, sufficient amount of
domain knowledge to identify valuable insights. Next possible
challenging issue faced by healthcare sectors is the shortage of
professionals who understand big data analysis. Therefore,
healthcare industry needs skilled professionals to manage and
analyze massive amount of real-time data being collected from
various internal and external sources in multiple formats.
Currently, the big data scientist and analysts are very less but
they have high demand to the healthcare industry in order to
manage large datasets efficiently.
Still, there is no fixed standards followed by the healthcare
industry to share the vital information across different agents.
The vast amount of vital information is collected and amassed
from various devices which may create interoperability
challenges, so they have to be flexible enough to cope with not
only the additional sources but also the evolution of schemas
and structures used for transporting and storing data. Even, the
healthcare organizations do not use or follow a single standard
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to deliver the services such as case reports, drugs, diseases,
and it may vary according to the different hospitals
requirements. However, the lack of a common standard among
the different healthcare systems will increase the
interoperability problems. As well, the hospitals cannot
manage large volumes of structured and unstructured data
efficiently using traditional database management systems.
They will have to shift from relational databases to NoSQL or
non-relational databases to analyze, process, and access the
large datasets rapidly and efficiently [30]. Also, they will have
to select various analysis tools differ from each other in
several aspects. Each and every non-relational database or
NoSQL tool has its own advantages and disadvantages during
the analysis stages. However, the data scientists or healthcare
industries must pick the right non-relational database and best
data management tool for accelerating the quality of care.
VI. CONCLUSION
This article explores how big data analytics offers a great
boon to the healthcare industry, as it helps to make better
decisions. Accordingly, it investigates the potential unique
characteristics, different phases, and analytical tools of the big
health data. Some of the open research challenges and feasible
solutions are highlighted in order to reduce the healthcare cost,
enhance treatment, and improve the quality of patient care.
With the help of analytics tools, data scientists can able to
integrate health related information from both internal and
external sources. Ultimately, physicians can be alerted to do
their treatment and reach out to patients in an efficient way.
This massive volume of huge healthcare data eventually leads
to a risk of exposure of the data, makes it highly vulnerable.
Thus, it is very essential for analysts and data scientists to
consider security issues and deal with the data sets in such a
way that will not lead to the disruption of privacy. However,
big data analytics is still a challenging and time demanding
task in healthcare that needs expensive software, hardware,
storage, computational infrastructure, skilled data scientists
and professionals in the healthcare sectors. Furthermore, it has
to enable the data lakes to be scaled up and down rapidly by
adapting the system to the actual demand. The combination of
disruptive technologies including machine learning,
augmented reality and artificial intelligence on big data is
already assisting, multiplying caregivers’ ability to improve
the quality of patient care. The comprehensive review of
several big data analytical techniques available for healthcare
applications will be discussed in future.
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