Big Data is creating a lot of buzz in the healthcare industry these days, but are our hospitals really ready for such a radical overhaul of the way they go about fighting diseases and saving lives?

Some of the largest healthcare organizations in the country undoubtedly are, but there’s also no question that smaller to mid-sized hospitals and clinics are a long way from being ready to embrace the hottest trend in technology right now. An Information Week Healthcare study last year revealed that in spite of Big Data’s promise, more than half of healthcare providers in the US still have no plans to implement Big Data analytics any time soon.

This is a shame because Big Data holds enormous promise in so many different aspects of the healthcare industry, from medical research and clinical decision support, to personalized care and even IT administration. The basic premise is that by combining data from disparate sources such as clinical, environmental and genomic factors, medical professionals can yield more insights into specific diseases, and through that try to achieve better outcomes for their patients.

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Big Data Will Transform The Face Of Healthcare

We’ve seen a lot of evidence of this recently. Just this week at the HIMSS Conference, Gregory Veltri, CIO of Denver Health, and Mical DeBrow, PhD, RN, gave a presentation called “Extracting Value from Healthcare Big Data with Predictive Analytics,” in which they pointed to new research on tamoxifen therapy as a prime example of Big Data’s potential. According to the study, patients given a 1-year regimen of the drug were 56% less likely to see a recurrence of their breast cancer compared to those patients on the current recommendation of just five years.

Then there’s the recent study by Kaiser Permanente on the frequency of blood clots in women taking oral contraceptives. The results caused a big surprise, revealing women receiving one particular, unnamed formula containing an ingredient called drospirenone were 77% more likely to suffer blood clots than women using different formulas. And not so long ago, the Seton Healthcare Family discovered that patients suffering from congestive heart failure who display a distended jugular vein are far more likely to be readmitted with similar problems in future than those who don’t.

In each of the above cases, the researchers who discovered these insights worked for some of the biggest healthcare organizations in the country and could benefit from the most advanced Big Data systems around. The reality for most healthcare organizations however is that they’re a long way from getting their hands on the kinds of high-end data analysis tools to provide the insights that their physicians and clinicians so desperately need.

Big Data Is No Longer An Option, It’s An Obligation

Cost is one of the biggest stumbling blocks for Big Data in healthcare right now, even though Big Data applications like Hadoop are open-source; the fact is it takes a serious investment of time and money to implement these systems, even if they are fundamentally ‘free’.

But this is a state of affairs that’s slowly changing, as the return on investment in Big Data analytics becomes more and more compelling. It’s not just that health organizations will be able to offer better care to their customers and reduce the frequency of clinical errors; there’s also a clear business case for hospitals to invest in this technology. Hospitals that make “meaningful use” of computers can benefit from millions of dollars in government funding thanks to an Obama-backed initiative that sets aside $14.6 billion to encourage electronic medical record adoption.

Some healthcare providers will continue to resist Big Data, citing the huge investment in money and time needed to implement these systems. But ultimately they’ll be pushed into doing so whether they like it or not, which is exactly why they should stop resisting and move to embrace Big Data as soon as possible. We’re fast reaching point where patients will demand Big Data in all aspects of healthcare, and when this movement gains enough popular support, the government will eventually insist on it, leaving healthcare providers with no option but to get to work – and that is a moment that really can’t come soon enough.

Given the massive ramifications that Big Data will have on healthcare, adoption will no longer be just an ‘option’ for providers – it’ll become an obligation, and so the sooner they get cracking the better it’ll be for everyone involved.

Just what the doctor ordered, in other words.