Big Data in Health Organizations

Subject: Health and Social Care

Number of words/pages: 582 words/2 pages

Topics: Healthcare, Hospitals, Physician

This essay sample was donated by a student to help the academic community

Table of contents

Introduction

Healthcare organizations are at times faced with mountains of data which is unstructured which presents a pressing issue of how to store and preserve it. For smaller hospitals organizations, disc-based data storage system might be a viable option. However for the large hospital’s organizations, systems that can handle data in terabytes or petabytes will be most useful. There are several options available for a hospital organization that need to store large systems of data. Cloud is one choice but flash is also gaining acceptability as a storage option. Blockchain technology is also a suitable healthcare data storage channel (Sukumar, Natarajan, & Ferrell, 2015, pg 626). Having these data on separate databases is important for the health organization because the information in the hospital database can only be accessed by staff. When the patient needs to be attended by a specialist outside their provider network, access to patient records could be challenging. With separate databases, the outside specialist can access to patient data from a separate database. Just with a click of the button without necessary risking access to private hospital data.

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The Body

There is a growing interest in the privacy of the patient information that is preserved digitally. This information at times needs to be accessed by the physicians in order to make healthy decisions for the patient. As such then the patient has the right to determine how and when their information is shared. The patient information is usually at a high risk of being misused because of the number of persons that have access to it (Abouelmehdi, Beni-Hssane, Khaloufi, & Saadi, 2017, pg 75). The physicians have a moral duty to safeguard this information from wrong hands by documenting the use of the patient information. However, the aspect of sharing security code between the physicians and Radiologists complicated the security status of patient information. Therefore when a hospital has a single database it is possible for physicians to access almost all information regarding a patient of the hospital even the ones that are not under their care.

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Conclusion

The use of big data in hospitals requires data specialists in the hospitals who will be handling the data issues as well as managing the accessibility of patient information. Radiologists are persons that are in charge of creating space in the clouds where the hospital and patient information could be stored and accessed by the physicians whenever they need it electronically. This means that the hospital will then have to have additional staff whose main work will be to maintain the data space as well as safeguarding the security of the data. In order to keep up with the high-security expectations, the hospital will need to invest in the latest storage facilities for the big data which is quite costly (Bajwa 2014, pg 652). This would be essential in order to safeguard the data from unauthorized personnel that might misuse it as well as keeping track of the persons as well as machines that are used to access the information. This works well in increasing the integrity as well as the responsibility of the physicians.

1. Abouelmehdi, K., Beni-Hssane, A., Khaloufi, H., & Saadi, M. (2017). Big data security and privacy in healthcare: A Review. Procedia Computer Science. 113, 73-80.

2. Bajwa M. (2014). Emerging 21(st) Century Medical Technologies. Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences. 30, 649-55.

3. Sukumar, S. R., Natarajan, R., & Ferrell, R. K. (2015). Quality of Big Data in health care. International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance. 28, 621-634.