Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

The Healthcare industry has been having a hard time trying to save time and dollars to improving patient outcomes for healthcare organizations through the use of data analytics. Many health systems find it difficult capturing and using the data from its patients to make a real impact on their businesses, especially considering the enormous amount of redundancies and unanswered questions when it comes to dealing with healthcare.

“Making sense out of big data is a challenge, particularly in the healthcare industry where information comes from a variety of sources and in different forms including structured, unstructured, images, temporal, geo-location and signal data,” says Jans Aasman, PhD, CEO of Franz, Inc., specializing in semantic web technologies.

The solution may have finally appeared in the form of SDL’s (Semantic Data Lakes) says Aasman.  In collaboration between The Montefiore Medical Center in Bronx, New York, Franz, Inc., Intel, Cloudera, and Cisco, SDL is a system that allows you to get all the data together from different silos for analytics. It will then be used to transform statistical databases, such as spreadsheets, into interactive graph databases that can be used to make better informed and predictive healthcare decisions.

Parsa Mirhaji MD, PhD, associate professor of Systems and Computational Biology and director of Clinical Research Informatics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center-Institute for Clinical Translational Research says SDL’s will enable healthcare providers the use of multiple types of data sets simultaneously for a comprehensive view of population trends.

He adds that the ability to conduct real-time analysis over new combinations of data such as patient information, genetic data, medical device data, clinical trials, drug information and public health data—will fuel discoveries, significantly improve efficiencies and personalize care.

“What we’re investing most of our time in now is the semantic data lake, where we store data in a key value store in Hadoop [Hbase], but then index it with our graph database so that we can do these SPARQL queries,” Aasman says. “In general, Hadoop is the ultimate in scalability but no one has yet succeed in putting really complex data into Hadoop. It’s usually simple data, and everybody is working hard to make it easier to put complex data into Hadoop.”

The multidimensional data project currently in use at Montefiore, is expecting trillions of data points growth in 2016. The hospital uses SDLs to compile EHR (electronic health record) data and look for links about health trends in a particular region and other clinic information for practitioners. The researchers say that the platform could be available wide-scale in healthcare in the next five years.

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