Possibilities of Big Data for Medical Devices

By Embedded Advisor | Friday, January 11, 2019

Medical devices currently generate voluminous, essential data that can make a significant clinical impact. But this data remains highly underutilized and wasted. New age technologies like big data hold the potential to store and analyze this data for better insights of medical devices and patient health. Discovery of actionable insights would benefit patient care, health monitoring and augment the growth of the medical device industry. Predictive analysis using big data is technology which learns from its experience and predicts the outcomes in order to drive a better decision.

Numerous companies are adopting the technology in their business models, as predictive models for patient risk and resource use enable them to improve quality of care and patient outcomes. Technology provides physicians useful insight to enhance their triage.

Incorporating big data in medical devices would the pave the path for smart medical machinery which would diagnose the patient and interpret the results at the same time. Data made available from imagers and scanners would leverage devices to differentiate between normal and abnormal scans. Smart imagers can soon be connected to a vast image library and patient health records, integrating machine learning technology would enable them to make connections between image characteristics and health outcomes to enhance diagnostic accuracy.

Medical devices powered by data analytics would automatically alert doctors about abnormalities and changes from the previous scan for thorough review. The power of data analytics can significantly increase the diagnostic speed, accuracy and allow physicians to focus more on patient care and communication.

Predictive analytics can assist in the prediction of epidemics. Analyzing the health data accumulated from various medical devices over a period of time can lead to detecting the traits of an epidemic even before it shows up, which certainly is beyond human analyzing power. Big data technology can also prove beneficial in drug discoveries as it can provide insights to results of certain drug and result in its improvement.

Data is the fuel that drives this technology, better and vast the data, accurate will be the result. Currently, the technology is in its early stages and withholds many possibilities for the medical sector. Proper implementation and utilization will result in surprising breakthroughs and discoveries through big data.