Big Data in Health Care: Applications and Challenges

Abstract

The concept of Big Data is popular in a variety of domains. The purpose of this review was to summarize the features, applications, analysis approaches, and challenges of Big Data in health care. Big Data in health care has its own features, such as heterogeneity, incompleteness, timeliness and longevity, privacy, and ownership. These features bring a series of challenges for data storage, mining, and sharing to promote health-related research. To deal with these challenges, analysis approaches focusing on Big Data in health care need to be developed and laws and regulations for making use of Big Data in health care need to be enacted. From a patient perspective, application of Big Data analysis could bring about improved treatment and lower costs. In addition to patients, government, hospitals, and research institutions could also benefit from the Big Data in health care.