Amazon’s webinar today highlighted several ways that Big Data is being used in the HCLS industry. One of the key insights was the self-realization within one of the featured medical practices that they were “data rich, insight poor.” Having tremendous amounts of data isn’t much value to anyone without the appropriate tools and skills to visualize, interact and explore the data, which of course needs to be coupled with people who are empowered to act on the insights revealed.
Several of the tools demonstrated seemed to use Shiny and R to create interactive graphics. This is a perfect combination of developer skills preparing the right kind of visualizations so that self-service data exploration becomes meaningful. So many self-service reporting tools end up being huge time sinks because the fundamental data organization was incomplete or inconsistent.
One of the featured labs highlighted how expenses were reduced and customer satisfaction increased by the appropriate use of dashboards and educated data exploration. They were able to reduce repetitive testing and quickly identify trends in unreimbursed testing. Then with data at their fingertips they were able to discuss the trade-offs between economic and medical goals.
Some technologies to investigate further:
- Amazon QuickSight: self-service analytics visualization
- Amazon Macie: for discovering, classifying and protecting sensitive data
- Amazon SageMaker: infrastructure to simplify machine learning at scale
Technostology 