Page 85 - Building Big Data Applications

80 Building Big Data Applications

These lessons and learnings are now enabling more complexity to be handled, which
we will discuss in the next two sections, one on healthcare and the other on research.
Patient care has been a big problem to solve for the governmental agencies, insurance
companies, pharmacies, physicians, and patients. In a traditional method that was fol-
lowed for many years, we as patients will setup an appointment with a physician and on
the first visit to the office, fill information about ourselves, family history, reason for visit,
insurance information, employment information, and if the visit is for a family member,
the primary insured will sign a financial support section. All of this once complete, will
provide the physician the ability to bill the insurance company for your visit and their
time spent with you.
Each follow-up visit will provide opportunity to collect details of what is called an
episode, which is your current state of health and associated encounters or reactions to
medicine or diet or exercise. Each episode can have more than one encounter and each
encounter can mean you are provided different medicines and prescriptions. Now if
there were paper collection of all of these details, it became burdensome as time went
by, and if people changed physicians for whatever reason, all of the paper had to be
transferred to the new physician. This meant three issues:

Security of data
Paperwork inefficiencies
Loss of productive time
As we evolved in the world of digital data, we started using Representational State
Transfer (RESTful) application programming interfaces (APIs) to manage data exchange
between applications and systems. To improve the data management of a patient we
need to think of creating REST API layers that can deliver data in an interoperable layer
(Fig. 3.5).

Doctor’s office opens for business

Patient arrives for a visit

Patient fills all registration forms and provides insurance details. If not the first visit, the patient identifies
themselves and pay the deductible co-pay.

Patient is checked in by a nurse and all vitals are taken. Nurse makes notes of why the visit
Physician arrives and provides consultation, makes notes and provides a prescription for further treatment

Patient collects the prescription or provides a pharmacy where they can pick-up the same

Patient gets a follow-up visit date and confirms the same
FIGURE 3.5 Doctor’soffice.