Healthcare Big Data Trends Leading To Analytics Spending

Ready to exploit big data? So are your competitors, and they’re preparing to spend big bucks in areas where they’ve historically been weak, such as predictive analytics and data discovery, reports  HealthcareITNews.

Technology vendor Lavastorm Analytics recently surveyed more than 600 technology professionals in healtlhcare and other industries about their IT investment plans for this ear.

Right now, researchers found, three-quarters of respondents still routinely use Excel for self-service analytics processes, and 35 percent use the R programming language.  Of the remaining 24 self-service analytics tools listed by the survey, 17 of them were used by less than 10 percent of the audience. In other words, once you get past R and Excel for analytics, there’s little agreement as to what works best.

But the coming months should bring some big changes in this landscape, Lavastorm’s research suggests. As the desire to exploit big data grows, providers are planning investments that will allow them to exploit it. Nearly 60 percent of respondents plan to increase their investments in areas where their capacity is limited.

Those areas include gleaning insights from data (25 percent), accessing data (22 percent) and having the ability to integrate and manipulate data (19 percent), HealthcareITNews says.

To meet those goals, providers intend to invest in predictive analytics (51 percent), big data (35 percent), dashboards (32 percent), reporting (31 percent) and data exploration and discovery (30 percent). At the same time, 27 percent said that they’d invest in advanced visualization tools and 24 percent self-service analytics tools for business users.

All this being said, my hunch that providers probably aren’t particularly sure where they’re headed with this technology yet.  I’d like to have seen Lavastorm ask which clinical or business goals, specifically, they hoped to meet by making these investments, wouldn’t you?