A benefit of using big data would be having availability and access to pertinent patient data. This is important because a provider at a different facility other than the patient’s primary facility that the patient attends, will be able to see home medications, recent office visits or emergency room visits as well as medical and surgical history. In the Health Informatics and Population video, Grant Scevchik talks about how being able to pull up Joe’s trend over time for his diabetes with big data helps the physicians and health care team treat the patient more promptly and appropriately. This can be beneficial during reassessment of diseases and management. A physician is able to access patient progress or noncompliance versus a patient walking in their office with no chart or health care information available (Laurette Education, 2018).
A challenge of using big data is having everyone on board with the same electronic health record system. For example, the facility I work at uses the EPIC documentation system. If an office or another facility does not use EPIC, the patient’s data is not readily available to them and needs to be faxed if they request it or they go without the patient’s medical record. This is why it is important to explore big data’s architecture, components and functionalities (Wang et al, 2018).
A strategy that I have observed that might effectively mitigate the challenges or risks of big data is not having so many flowsheets and places to document in the patient’s electronic health record (EHR). I believe it would also be cheaper for facilities to have a system that is compatible with others and not have to deal with the struggle of going through so many flowsheets, pages, labs, results of imaging, doctor’s notes and care management updates as well. As a health care worker, having an upgraded system is great, but trying to find the proper flowsheet to document in, read new plans of care and adding in more rows and columns to be able to document pertinent data is inconvenient. What is even worse is, the physicians do not know how to get into the nurse’s flowsheets to read the nurses assessments, they just know how to access the nurses notes and that is if the nurse decides he/she wants to put one in because it is not required documentation. Data mining allows us to see a trend with patients and track their visits, patterns and can be used to increase or decrease costs (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2017). The problem is knowing where to look in a patient’s chart where pertinent information is readily available for primary care physicians, specialists and hospitalists for when the patient is admitted.
References
Laurette Education (Producer). (2018). Health Informatics and Population Health: Analyzing
Data for Clinical Success
. Baltimore, MD: Author.
McGonigle, D., & Mastrian, K.G. (2017). Nursing Informatics and the foundations of knowledge
(4th ed.). Chapter 22, “Data Mining as a Research Tool” (pp477-493).
Wang, Y., Kung, L., & Byrd, T.A. (2018). Big data analytics: understanding its capabilities and
potential benefits for healthcare organizations. Technological Forecasting and social
Change, 126 (1), 3-13.
Discussion: Big Data Risks and Rewards
When you wake in the morning, you may reach for your cell phone to reply to a few text or email messages that you missed overnight. On your drive to work, you may stop to refuel your car. Upon your arrival, you might swipe a key card at the door to gain entrance to the facility. And before finally reaching your workstation, you may stop by the cafeteria to purchase a coffee.
From the moment you wake, you are in fact a data-generation machine. Each use of your phone, every transaction you make using a debit or credit card, even your entrance to your place of work, creates data. It begs the question: How much data do you generate each day? Many studies have been conducted on this, and the numbers are staggering: Estimates suggest that nearly 1 million bytes of data are generated every second for every person on earth.
As the volume of data increases, information professionals have looked for ways to use big data—large, complex sets of data that require specialized approaches to use effectively. Big data has the potential for significant rewards—and significant risks—to healthcare. In this Discussion, you will consider these risks and rewards.
To Prepare:
- Review the Resources and reflect on the web article Big Data Means Big Potential, Challenges for Nurse Execs.
- Reflect on your own experience with complex health information access and management and consider potential challenges and risks you may have experienced or observed.
By Day 3 of Week 5
Post a description of at least one potential benefit of using big data as part of a clinical system and explain why. Then, describe at least one potential challenge or risk of using big data as part of a clinical system and explain why. Propose at least one strategy you have experienced, observed, or researched that may effectively mitigate the challenges or risks of using big data you described. Be specific and provide examples.
By Day 6 of Week 5
Respond to at least two of your colleagues* on two different days, by offering one or more additional mitigation strategies or further insight into your colleagues’ assessment of big data opportunities and risks.
I have used several different EHR systems throughout my career and have found it highly frustrating that the systems do not communicate. Even when I was using EPIC and would accept a transfer from a hospital outside the network that also uses EPIC, the patient information would not transfer over. As the trend of “big data in the cloud” continues, there may be a solution to this problem in the near future (Wang, Y., et al., 2018).
While researching this topic I found that there are several studies attempting to create a way for EHR systems to speak to each other. One way is by using a “cloud” web-portal. In a study conducted by Dubovitskaya, A., et al. (2019), the authors attempted to create a cloud web-portal that a patient’s information would be downloaded to, using cryptographic block-chain technology. This information could then be accessed and downloaded safely by an EHR using an encryption key. Of course there are limitation to this study, especially since this technology is newer and not regulated by the government. It will be great to have this technology up and running over the next few years!
Resources
Dubovitskaya, A., Baig, F., Xu, Z., Shukla, R., Zambani, P. S., Swaminathab, A., Jahangir, M., Chowdhry, K., Lachhani, R., Idnani, N., Schumacher, M., Aberer, K., Stoller, S. D., Ryu, S., & Wang, F. (2019). Action ehr: patient-centric blockchain-based electronic health record data management for cancer care. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 22(8). https://www.jmir.org/2020/8/e13598/
Wang, Y., Kung, L., & Byrd, T. A. (2018). Big data analytics: understanding its capabilities and potential benefits for healthcare organizations. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 126(1), 3-13. https://www-sciencedirect-com.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/science/article/pii/S0040162516000500?via%3Dihub