One of the most important and crucial data for an individual is his Personal Health Record Data. Analysis of your historical Personal Health Record Data can help the doctor do much better analysis of your health and even predict diseases by looking at your historical medical test records.
My own definition of Predictive Analytics - The art of using multi dimensional historical data and predicting some event with high probability is called Predictive Analytics. Take a simple example of predicting your food craving for today by analysing your eating habit for last 12 months and you realize how predictable humans can be. You thought you ordered the unique combination of dishes but if you analyse your eating habits data you will realize you had just ordered food that you have been eating for ages but maybe prepared in a different style! ON lighter note, one of my good Punjabi friend once said he has been eating Aloo Parathas from the day he remembered and he is going to change his diet. I had never hear of a Punjabi saying no to paratha's so I curiously waited to hear what my friends would order and he ordered Gobi Paratha :) , so much for change of diet! (Here is a good Aloo Paratha Recipe by Chef Sanjeev Kapoor for those who have not tried Aloo Paratha)
Early detection & treatment of many critical illness like Cancer, Heart Disease etc can give you and your doctor a head start to tackling the disease early and improve the chances of cure. The 'insights from data' from medical tests that you have done all your life can give key insight to you and your doctor if the historical data is available for analysis in digital format. Historical data does not mean years of data, even 3 months clinical record data can give reasonably good prediction and going forward as the number of records increase your software's predictive ability keeps improving incrementally.
Unfortunately we are not in habit of maintaining our Personal Health Record Data over the time. Out health care systems are driven by commercials considerations and countries do not have adequate systems to maintain personal medical history from birth on wards.
I am speaking from my own experience on how we faced challenge to diagnose an illness because we were not familiar with Health Records, did not see the deviation in CBC reports (Complete Blood Count) parameters. We kept visiting a General Practitioner who did not interpret the data and only when we visited a specialist we came to understand the medical data that helped us diagnose the critical illness.
As a software engineer when I analyzed the situation I realized that if we had medical records in digital format and a software to view the records it would have been quite easy to identify the parameters that are deviating from normal acceptable range and it would have been much easier for the doctor to diagnose the disease. For patient with chronic illness it is critical to keep a watch over changing parameters even before you share the data with your doctor and a simple mobile application would help the patient to monitor his/her health.
There are 3 key points to note
1) There are standard acceptable range of values for each medical parameter of human body
2) Every person could have unique values for the standard medical parameters that may be lower or higher than the ideal range recommended by medical standards
3) Every illness will cause some deviation in personal medical parameters
So a software that is built considering the above the points can be customized to monitor health and change in health of each individual. With incremental propagation of mobile devices it is only logical that mobile devices are the best bet for Personal Health Monitoring Software that will empower each individual to Save, Analyse & Share his medical data on the go. Unfortunately neither the hospitals nor the government health services have focused on leveraging the Mobile to empower the patient to Collect & Digitize his/her medical records. I would have expected private companies in healthcare to leverage this opportunity to provide free software to the public to maintain their medical records and also use the software to build customer loyalty towards their brand. What is clearly lacking is a long term vision and intent to provide better health management for people.
What is required today from IT service providers is to bridge the gap between people, hospitals, insurance companies by building software that benefits all the parties.
1) People require a software that is free to use
2) Doctors, Hospitals, Labs & Insurance companies require a software that build customer loyalty, helps retain customers and can act as a channel to push notifications & promotions.
3) Doctors would like a software that helps interpreting data in a better way by digitizing the data and using sophisticated algorithm to predict illness or detect them in early stages. Mobile software reaches to the end customer who are slowly moving away from 'laptops to tablets & mobile' and increasingly becoming dependent on their mobile phones.
USA has few service providers and they have a unique model but their focus is different and focused on saving operational cost and not so much focus on value for patient and for doctors. The need to have a 'mobile software for the patient & for doctors'. The company that provides such software service will build a new segment in Asian continent & also in the Europe & USA and set the pace for next medical revolution that will build population of 'data aware health service consumer'.
I am speaking from my own experience on how we faced challenge to diagnose an illness because we were not familiar with Health Records, did not see the deviation in CBC reports (Complete Blood Count) parameters. We kept visiting a General Practitioner who did not interpret the data and only when we visited a specialist we came to understand the medical data that helped us diagnose the critical illness.
As a software engineer when I analyzed the situation I realized that if we had medical records in digital format and a software to view the records it would have been quite easy to identify the parameters that are deviating from normal acceptable range and it would have been much easier for the doctor to diagnose the disease. For patient with chronic illness it is critical to keep a watch over changing parameters even before you share the data with your doctor and a simple mobile application would help the patient to monitor his/her health.
There are 3 key points to note
1) There are standard acceptable range of values for each medical parameter of human body
2) Every person could have unique values for the standard medical parameters that may be lower or higher than the ideal range recommended by medical standards
3) Every illness will cause some deviation in personal medical parameters
So a software that is built considering the above the points can be customized to monitor health and change in health of each individual. With incremental propagation of mobile devices it is only logical that mobile devices are the best bet for Personal Health Monitoring Software that will empower each individual to Save, Analyse & Share his medical data on the go. Unfortunately neither the hospitals nor the government health services have focused on leveraging the Mobile to empower the patient to Collect & Digitize his/her medical records. I would have expected private companies in healthcare to leverage this opportunity to provide free software to the public to maintain their medical records and also use the software to build customer loyalty towards their brand. What is clearly lacking is a long term vision and intent to provide better health management for people.
What is required today from IT service providers is to bridge the gap between people, hospitals, insurance companies by building software that benefits all the parties.
1) People require a software that is free to use
2) Doctors, Hospitals, Labs & Insurance companies require a software that build customer loyalty, helps retain customers and can act as a channel to push notifications & promotions.
3) Doctors would like a software that helps interpreting data in a better way by digitizing the data and using sophisticated algorithm to predict illness or detect them in early stages. Mobile software reaches to the end customer who are slowly moving away from 'laptops to tablets & mobile' and increasingly becoming dependent on their mobile phones.
USA has few service providers and they have a unique model but their focus is different and focused on saving operational cost and not so much focus on value for patient and for doctors. The need to have a 'mobile software for the patient & for doctors'. The company that provides such software service will build a new segment in Asian continent & also in the Europe & USA and set the pace for next medical revolution that will build population of 'data aware health service consumer'.
