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It is no secret that access to health care is a real challenge in rural parts of the world. While the urban landscape of the country now has the means to comfortably avail smooth access to public transportation, advanced medical care, and innovative preventive programs, the rural parts are lagging far behind in these aspects. As appalling as it sounds, the fact remains that 15% of Americans residing in rural parts do not have access to adequate health care. Narrowing down further we find that on average 46 million people living in the countryside are older, sicker, and have less access to medical care than those who live in urban areas, and the gap has widened in recent years.

Did you know one-third of all the patients never follow through their referrals? Or that most healthcare organizations lose about 30% to 60% patients on account of inefficient referrals? If by the year 2020, value-based care is expected to be the dominant payment model, no health system can afford losing more than half of their revenue to poor leakages and its ramifications.

A personal health record of any patient, whether it is an aging parent, a spouse or a child with a chronic illness, contains a summary of medications, lab results, visit notes, billing information and more, and interoperability makes it easy to manage all these files and documents with just a few clicks.

Imagine two patients, almost identical, found with a high risk of congestive heart failure. One patient hailing from Florida, a 58-year old male and another male patient from Kentucky, of the same age. Both these patients happened to visit the same physician from the same local health system where they were told to monitor their cholesterol intake, watch what they eat and take certain medicines every day. They were advised to undergo a bunch of tests, and if there are any complications, their care plan would be adjusted accordingly.

The term ‘Big data’ has been making rounds in the healthcare space for quite some time. So far, we have witnessed how Big data has been availed to carry out data integration, population health management, care management, referral management and quality reporting. But, there is another very crucial aspect where Big data is playing its part. Beyond increasing operational processes and efficiencies of a given network, Big data in healthcare is being used to predict episodes, cure disease, improve quality of life, and avoid preventable deaths.

I can easily, hands down, say that no one is a stranger to the ‘quality-versus-quantity of care’ debate. A while ago, I read about a patient with terminal cancer and the choices she made following her diagnosis. The patient, a 51-year old female was diagnosed with stage IV metastatic breast cancer. Following the example of several other women, she too contacted her physician, had a mammography followed by a biopsy, which confirmed her doubts and the diagnosis of breast cancer.