Big data analysis is a revolutionary tool in the modern world, and it has brought significant changes to industries ranging from healthcare and politics to insurance and sport. In this article, a big data consulting firm discusses how big data as well as wearable gadgets are now transforming the health and insurance sectors in 2017. First, let’s look at how big data is changing health care.
Wearable technology is the recent smart revolution in the healthcare sector. These are portable gadgets ranging from activity trackers and pacemakers to smart watches. While we cant really count the number of these gadgets in the market today, there are over a hundred thousand healthcare apps available for users, according to the report, and these can be downloaded from the app stores.
How Big Data Brings Changes to Healthcare and Insurance Industries in 2017
Healthcare and Pharma industries from around the globe are experiencing significant challenges including low access, high cost, little price transparency, over prescription, declining trust, weak R&D pipeline, effective medication, etc. With big data, both industries can overcome most of these challenges by simply adopting the analysis technology.
The healthcare industry is vast and lucrative, especially for the technology sector to invest more resources in form of high value propositions, and calculating the benefits of the available opportunities. It has become crucial for healthcare and pharmaceutical industries to start leveraging technologies in order to solve the challenges they face.
But one question remains, which of the innovative technologies is largely responsible for the disruption in healthcare? Well, an in-depth analysis of the industry reveals that numerous promising technologies that can transform the healthcare industry. Such technologies are ideally a mix of high performance hardware, next gen software, and efficient networks.
Smart gadgets and wearables can be used to collect a variety of clinical data and to provide the essential services to fix problems related to skin, stress, heart rate, eyes, diabetes, etc. Nonetheless, the healthcare industry still lags behind when it comes to releasing mobile apps. Apps can potentially make the experience of learning about health and treatment much easier for the patients. Overall, patients who are reminded of their medication, and their progress tracked via mobile apps attain better treatment.
The healthcare industry hasn’t yet realized how innovative social media can be. The hospital staff and doctors alike have used social media tools to communicate with in-field healthcare professionals and their patients as well. But social media can do more; especially when it comes to empowering patients. In essence, patients can easily access and validate data from multiple gadgets, and interact with other patients who are dealing with similar problems.
One of the major challenges with healthcare is the fact that the medical data collected from diagnosis, drug discoveries, and patient’s behaviour is vast, but with no interoperability. The big data analysis technology essentially recovers these differences, and makes the process much more efficient by enabling the interoperability of the data.
Big Data in the Insurance Industry
Insurance companies around the world are now capitalizing on big data technologies, analytics, cloud computing, and modelling techniques to enhance their market segmentation strategies, and to strengthen their risk management and underwriting services, and to lower claims fraud.
While there are several ways through which insurers are leveraging big data and data analytics’ best practices to enjoy the benefits, there are a few areas where the impact is being felt the most.
1. Streamed Underwriting
The future of underwriting is changing with big data. The with real time data mining, the underwriting process is now more streamlined, where precise, and current insights that might have taken significantly more time to locate and merge are provided. Quality data sources enable underwriters to complete their tasks in comparatively less time, and with increased efficiency.
2. Custom Policies Data
Since underwriters can access multi-channel data sources, big data essentially empowers them to base their parameters of their policies and premium costs on a realistic perspective. This integration drives more personalized consumer experience. For example, the health insurance for someone who works for themselves in a desk-based job, maybe very different to someone in an active job as self-employed people work longer hours and are often subject to greater stress than others..
3. Identifying Clients at a Risk of Cancellation
Insights from big data are commonly used to offer quality prospects for organizations. Nonetheless, there’s only a few number of people aware that it can be used to recognize the low quality prospects. With the advanced analytics tools, insurance firms can target the loyal clients and identify those seeking cancellation.
4. Identify Fraud Risks
The insurance industry is often faced with fraudulent claims. Big data allows insurers to identify the risk of fraud via predictive data analytics. In addition, once a claim has been made, the insurers can leverage the data mining technology to track social and digital channels to seek evidence for fraudulent behavior.