Big Data and Healthcare Data: A Survey

Big data and its analytics yield a lot of opportunities to make great progresses in many fields, ranging from economic and business activities to public administration, from national security to scientific researches and so on. However, the most noticeable point is that healthcare data has been recently identified as a prime example of big data. Undoubtedly, efficient use of healthcare resources has become a key factor in improving overall healthcare system. But for managing healthcare data and obtaining potential results, we need integration and sharing of data that ultimately demand the concept of distributed system. The paper in its first phase gives an overview on big data and healthcare data from different aspects. A review on the state-of-the-art distributed file system (Hadoop) is conducted in this stage too. The primary aim of this phase is to provide an overall picture on big data as well as healthcare data for non-expert readers. In the next phase, a cloud-based e-health system is proposed for the expert audiences. The expected promising characteristics as well as the managerial implications of the model are highlighted in the analysis section.