Big Data in Healthcare

Collection, storage and analysis of health data have been, are and will be one of the fundamentals to provide efficient healthcare services and its importance is only increasing considering the growing amount of health data collected every day.The situation gets even more complicated because relevant health information does not only come from traditional interviews and medical tests in a hospital or outpatient clinic, but it involves data that patients collect themselves using wearables for telemonitoring and data that healthy people collect using a wide variety of health and wellbeing apps.According to the Ericsson Mobility Report of 2015 there were at the end of 2015 around 7.3 billion mobile subscriptions i.e., there are as many mobile subscriptions as there are people on this planet and all of them create every day new and valuable data about health and wellbeing.In addition, thanks to new technologies there is more data collected in clinical settings in addition to genetic information which itself is already big data by volume.Combined this information allows better understanding health patterns and can be used not only for curing diseases but also for preventing them, improving patient safety and preserving quality of life i.e., it improves overall health outcome and reduces healthcare spending.Furthermore, information, that is, originally collected for a completely different purpose may also give an important insight to a disease i.e., information from social media, from loyalty cards of shops, use of public transport and business transactions may improve our understanding of trends in shopping/cooking/eating habits together with trends in physical activity in different age and social groups.In other words, we are talking about Big Data in healthcare and for public health policy making 1.