The largest pharmacy benefit management company in the U.S., Express Scripts handles more than 1.4 billion prescriptions each year, which breaks down to roughly 160 quadrillion bits of data. It uses that data to help Americans make better decisions about their health.

According to IBM, 80 percent of medical data is unstructured and relevant to improving healthcare efficiencies and outcomes. The problem is that it lies in hard to reach places, sources like lab systems, CRM reports, and handwritten doctor’s notes. Organizations from multiple segments in the healthcare field are looking towards IT to unleash and harness the true value in their informational assets.

• Predicting Patient Behavior

Express Scripts, in particular, is leveraging predictive analytics to make sense of the wealth of data at its disposal. Armed with 40 plus predictive models, its analytics team is able to identify patterns in various patient scenarios and customize solutions for individual patients at risk. For instance, data can be used to determine whether a patient is likely to stop taking their medication, or identify which channels will likely be most useful for communicating with certain patients. Express Scripts plans to outdo its performance this year by deploying another 80 predictive models in 2014.

• Tailoring Personal Customer Experiences

When it comes to the healthcare arena, data isn’t limited to the wards of hospitals and clinics – it exists in the insurance realm as well. Insurance firm Cigna has thrown its chips on the table by adopting a data-driven strategy to improve customer service. Cigna’s goal is creating a personalized experience for the customer, which it does by looking at data from diverse sources such as preferences, mobile interactions, and even social media. In addition to creating its own customer profiles, Cigna leans on analytics from Altegra Health to make better business decisions and improve customer relations.

• Supporting Multiple Organizational Needs

Integration enables vast amounts of data to be visualized and analyzed in a manner that is easy to read and put into action. Partners Healthcare is capitalizing on this very element to merge the data in its clinical, financial, and operational systems. At the core of that merger is Queriable Patient Inference Dossier (QPID), an intelligence system with features such as real-time querying, custom metrics, and robust reporting capabilities. According to Partners, approximately 5,000 medical professionals are using the system to increase productivity, reduce costs, improve quality of care, and meet other needs.

With so much information in so many silos structured and unstructured, the big data revolution looks primed for the healthcare field. What are some of the worthwhile innovations you’ve seen in this industry?

Source: bigdatacompanies.com