Big data in healthcare

While other industries have embraced the digital era, healthcare is still playing catch-up. Kaiser Permanente has been a leader in healthcare technology and first started using computing to improve healthcare results in the 1960s. Taposh Roy, Rajiv Synghal, and Sabrina Dahlgren offer an overview of Kaisers big data strategy and explain how other organizations can adopt similar strategies.

While all other industries have embraced the digital era, healthcare seems to be still playing catch-up. In this, Kaiser Permanente is an anomaly. Kaiser Permanente is a leader in healthcare technology—technology has been at center stage in Kaiser Permanente since it first started using computing to improve healthcare results in the 1960s. Today, Kaiser Permanente is an integrated health care delivery system with 10 million members and about 200,000 employees. Kaiser rolled out the first electronic medical records (EMR) system in the inpatient setting in 2005, and it was fully deployed in all regions and medical centers by 2010. Electronic medical records at Kaiser Permanente include not only the health plan view of the data but also pharmacy, insurance claims, hospital, and provider views. In addition, Kaiser Permanente manages many transactions in a member-centric online web portal available at kp.org. To leverage the immense amount of EMR data, domain-specific data warehouses have been developed over the last decade. However, with the increase in volume, velocity, variety of data (clinical, genetic, behavioral, social, environmental, and device), a new way of storing, cataloguing, searching and provisioning was recently developed. Running analytical workloads on this platform works wonders. However, the challenge is to make this 200,000-employee company data driven, break the silos, and develop a collaborative culture. Taposh Roy, Rajiv Synghal, and Sabrina Dahlgren offer an overview of Kaiser’s big data strategy and explain how other organizations can adopt similar strategies.