Analyzing Big Data has become the latest trend in the healthcare field. However, a report released by the Computer Sciences Corporation – a provider of technological solutions – encourages healthcare organizations to review their data-driven strategies before taking on Big Data projects.

The report – "Transforming Healthcare through Better Use of Data" – outlines several points that medical professionals should implement in their data analysis. For example, data integration is a major step toward creating a patient-centric medical record ready for analysis. By merging a patient's medication, medical procedures, treatments, demographics, diagnoses, lab results and other notes into one system, the healthcare provider will be closer to proper analysis of patient data.

Since various healthcare facilities have different models of recordkeeping, the report urges healthcare organizations to standardize data. A set pattern of data modeling would allow healthcare providers across the country to share patient information in order to improve overall care.

The report goes on to say that data sharing is a vital part of leveraging patient information. Through sharing medical records between providers, health insurers and the laboratory research community, individuals can gain a bigger use from their data. Cloud computing is one way this can be accomplished, as it allows the sharing of a large amount of information through web-based medical software.

"Cloud computing is a related idea that makes it possible for organizations to migrate large amounts of data onto a temporary platform," according to the report. "This can be attractive from a cost management perspective because organizations only pay cloud service providers for the computing resources that they use, thus avoiding large capital expenditures for servers."

Chiropractors looking to use patient data to improve care would benefit from adopting web-based EHR software as such chiropractic EHR will save costs by eliminating the need to install in-house servers.