Tag Archives: Research

How Data Improves Patient Health

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Good compliance and patient engagement are two objectives in the healthcare world that converge more than one would think. Recent health trends have created patients more invested in their own health and willing to work with care providers to meet their objectives. This is outstanding for medical professionals looking to create a solid foundation for their patients and keep them as healthy as possible. However, it is all too easy to get caught up in a fad and make poor decisions, so another burgeoning aspect of patient engagement centers around correcting common misconceptions and getting individuals back on the right track.

In contrast, compliance is a process that happens beyond the perception of patients. As I’ve discussed in the past, an increase in sharing data also increases the need to secure systems and ensure that information is not compromised. However, safely giving patients access to their own data can help empower healthcare providers and patients alike.

While the mass exchange of data, both internally and to patient portals and other healthcare institutions, creates more points where it can be stolen, it also leads to opportunities to educate patients and involve them in the process. The increase in IoT wearables for patients that can track biological metrics also contributes to patient engagement as well as research. Some of these wearables, despite being an ever-present aspect of the lives of some individuals, do not provide data to the people that use them. Freeing up access to this data increases the number of ways that a patient can help sustain their own health.

This is, in many ways, the central premise of patient engagement. There is no one way to instill a desire for self-improvement in patients. The only thing that healthcare providers can do is give them the freedom and the tools to monitor their own health. Patient portals, for instance, give individuals access to their own records, allowing them to do the legwork of tracking their progress over time. Other systems may remind patients to adhere to medication schedules, or help work them through things like physical therapy.

It then falls to providers to achieve good compliance in order to safely give patients leeway to create the foundation for good health. In a competitive industry, a healthcare organization can fall behind if they do not provide a positive experience for patients—to say nothing about what can happen if compliance is not met.

These care providers stand at a crossroads, and they must decide in what ways they will innovate to improve patient outcomes. Compliance should not be a process of checking off boxes for the sake of staying in business—it should be leveraged as a strategic tool to reevaluate aging systems and promote engagement among patients. There are a plethora of other benefits as well, and savvy organizations can use compliance as an opportunity to rethink the way they conduct IT, saving costs and setting up better agility in the long term.

In short, the technology exists to help patients take control of their lives—but it’s up to organizations to adopt it in a safe way that still remains compliant. It may sound strange to some medical professionals to fixate on technology in this way, but the ideal of good patient engagement can only be reached if the systems behind it function seamlessly.

Improving Research with the Cloud

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When it comes to fighting disease, it can often feel like an uphill battle that consumes funds and lives without end. While treatment options have improved greatly for diseases such as Parkinson’s, cancer, and heart disease, research methods associated with them have not and have remained largely stagnant over the past few decades.

Now, cloud technology may provide doctors and researchers with better, more consistent controls when it comes to collecting, measuring, and analyzing data. I’ve already discussed the ways that the cloud can assist with medical maintenance and improve patient outcomes through Big Data, but when applied to research, it offers consistency and an easy exchange of ideas.

Cloud computing is a prime example of disruptive technology, and nowhere else is it becoming more apparent than in the medical field, where integration with wearable devices offers access to a wealth of biometric readings in conjunction with easily-shared patient data, further blurring the line between treatment and research. Before this, data was often collected solely by doctors during patient visits, and inconsistent reporting measures majorly hampered the reach and quality of the collected data. The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research has tried to leave these practices behind and embrace cloud computing in an attempt to better understand and eventually cure the disease. With Big Data, the Foundation is able to get a better picture of the progression of the disease through patient wearables. Smartwatches allow researchers to monitor a number of biometric readings, including tremor symptoms and sleep patterns.

The Foundation’s CEO, Todd Sherer, Ph.D., remarked on the lack of progress in measuring Parkinson’s, stating that it measurement methods are “largely the same” as they were in 1817, when the disease was first described. In addition to the wearable devices that the Foundation uses, patients are capable of entering notes about their daily symptoms on a web portal as a more consistent substitute for reporting directly for a doctor. The information is then collected on Cloudera CDH, a secure data platform.

Parkinson’s isn’t the only disease that is being tracked through cloud services. The American Heart Association recently partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create a cloud system to empower scientists and researchers from all over the world to share data with each other. Previous data that has remained unseen for years is now being distributed on the cloud, to the mutual benefit of all organizations involved. While this system requires the people involved to sacrifice some level of self-benefit to provide progress toward a major problem facing humanity, enough researchers have stepped up to make the AHA’s new project a major step forward.

However, the cloud does still offer solutions for researchers interested in preserving their intellectual property. Hybrid clouds, another platform that I’ve discussed before, enable individuals to share data on a public cloud while storing their own progress on a private cloud. Because of this, others are still able to benefit from their research while they pioneer their own findings.

Not only is the cloud changing the way that data is collected and analyzed, it changes the type of data that can be measured. Compilation of genetic data is much more manageable than before thanks to better ways to sift through data, enabling researchers to better compare genomes and find subtle genetic trends that would otherwise take countless hours to detect.

Collecting a large amount of data to leverage through the cloud is part of the ongoing efforts of many research organizations; part of the ambitious Cancer Moonshot initiative is establishing a “data ecosystem” aimed at sharing and analyzing patient data on a national level.

It is exciting to see the cloud being used for medical goals in addition to business goals. From consumer trends to genetic trends, expect to see measurement metrics and data analysis improve substantially over the next few years as this disruptive technology rapidly becomes the norm in research.