A survey on big data in healthcare applications

Abstract

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 changing the traditional way of the data delivery system into valuable insights, especially in the healthcare industry. It 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. It has provided tools to accumulate, manage, analyze, and assimilate large volumes of disparate, structured, and unstructured vital data rapidly produced by the various healthcare information storage systems. However, there are several issues to be addressed in the current health data analytics platforms that offer technical methods such as vital data collection, aggregation, process, analysis, visualization, and sharing. Due to lack of detailed analysis in the existing research works, this paper examines the most significant characteristics of big data analytics in health care, various data sources and its data types, five R’s of big data analytics, and then briefly discusses the recent open research challenges with future directions.