UC Irvine Medical Center: Improving Quality of Care with Apache Hadoop by Charles Boicey.
From the post:
With a single observation in early 2011, the Hadoop strategy at UC Irvine Medical Center started. While using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Yahoo we came to the conclusion that healthcare data although domain specific is structurally not much different than a tweet, Facebook posting or LinkedIn profile and that the environment powering these applications should be able to do the same with healthcare data.
In healthcare, data shares many of the same qualities as that found in the large web properties. Each has a seemingly infinite volume of data to ingest and it is all types and formats across structured, unstructured, video and audio. We also noticed the near zero latency in which data was not only ingested but also rendered back to users was important. Intelligence was also apparent in that algorithms were employed to make suggestion such as people you may know.
We started to draw parallels to the challenges we were having with the typical characteristic of Big Data, volume, velocity and variety.
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The start of a series Hadoop in health care.
I am more interested in the variety question than volume or velocity but for practical applications, all three are necessary considerations.
From further within the post:
We saw this project as vehicle for demonstrating the value of Applied Clinical Informatics and promoting the translational effects of rapidly moving from “code side to bedside”. (emphasis added)
Just so you know to add the string “Applied Clinical Informatics” to your literature searches in this area.
The wheel will be re-invented often enough without your help.