Big Data and the Social Good: The Value for Healthcare Organizations

The following is a guest blog post by Mike Serrano from NETSCOUT. It’s a well-known fact that Facebook, Google, and our phone companies collect a lot of information about each of us. This has been the case for a long time, and more often than not it’s to improve the user experience of the services we rely on. If data is shared outside the organization, it’s anonymized to prevent the usage of any one individual from being identified. But it’s understandable while this practice has still sparked a passionate and longstanding debate about privacy and ‘big brother’-style snooping. What is often forgotten, however, or more likely drowned out by the inevitably growing chorus of privacy concerns, is the opportunity within the big data community for this valuable information to be used for social good. The potential is already there. The question, though, is how different organizations, and particularly the healthcare sector, can take advantage of anonymized user data to benefit society and improve the human condition. When it comes to healthcare, data from mobile networks holds the biggest opportunity for the patient experience to be dramatically improved. To truly understand how real-time traffic and big data, in the form of historical network usage and traffic patterns, can be used for social good, let’s look at a few possible scenarios – two of which can be accomplished without needing to disclose individual user information at all. Public health – Getting ahea...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Healthcare HealthCare IT Population Health Management Mike Serrano NETSCOUT Public Health Subscriber Information Source Type: blogs