Data curation involves maintaining, managing, preserving, sharing, and discovering data combinations for different use. The data is managed, studied, and presented in various visual formats for determining its use. All sectors today make use of data inputs to optimize their service. The healthcare sector is no exception. Digitization of the healthcare sector with the help of data has helped it in many areas including research and development, and patient care.
Digitization of the healthcare system has enabled the storage of real-world data about various patient activities, ranging from treatment to insurance settlement. These electronic health records are set to revolutionize the healthcare system.
What does Data Curation in Healthcare mean?
Electronic health records store important data about patient care and treatment. The process ensures that big sets of data are stored and made accessible when the need arises. However, the data thus stored is not done in a universally standardized system. This means there are inconsistencies in the collection as well as documentation. The process of data curation improves the quality of data by keeping the usable sets and discarding the incomplete ones. The process involves selecting and classifying data, checking its validity, and also improving the quality of data sets.
Types of Data broadly available in Healthcare:
- Electronic health records (EHR) are records containing a patient’s complete medical history including disease diagnosis, treatment, and recovery.
- Data are available in clinics and hospitals regarding their functioning and the population they serve.
- Data are available about treatment and the process of treatment.
- Clinical data or data about disease and different diagnoses made about the patient.
- Data about insurance claims and settlement.
- Data was obtained from a patient survey.
Here is how data curation can benefit healthcare professionals.
Support New Research:
There is a lot of data available about treatment and patient care. These data can range from clinical observations and findings, data about patient monitoring, exposures as well as genetic history. These huge data sets can provide important inputs in new studies. But, care must be taken to specially curate and optimize data for medical research. The best way to ensure that data curation benefits medical research is to ensure that data is collected and curated for that special purpose.
Create Healthcare Records:
Data curation helps in creating a historical record for patients. Curated data can give information about the illnesses that the patient has suffered, the symptoms that they had, the treatment given, and the drugs administered. It also stores crucial information about patient demographics, family, and social history. These data can help understand many important aspects of patient care like the progression of the disease, discern if the treatment given was successful and how symptoms were relieved.
All these essential data available will also help doctors predict any possible future complications or ailments that a patient is likely to suffer.
Facilitate Communication among Healthcare Providers:
Healthcare has become more coordinated. Different departments and service providers often need to communicate and cross-refer to give the best patient care. Data curation will make this a speedy and automated process and save crucial time spent tracking human contacts/professionals and taking notes from them.
Identify Trends and Plan Preventive Measures:
Healthcare data is important in identifying various trends in the medical sector like growth and development in children and the emergence of diseases at particular times of the year. Data curation can help study and analyze these trends and notice patterns and deviations. If there is any problem it can be identified. The trends can also help devise preventive measures for such developments and problems.
Leverage Data to Improve Treatment and Outcome:
Various new drugs are developed and tested every day. The efficacy and safety of these drugs are the major concerns before prescribing them to patients. Clinical trials are the standard procedures to ensure that efficacy and safety concerns are addressed. However, nothing is like real-world data that gives true information about how a drug is behaving after being administered to a population. Data curation gives essential insight into these factors with speed and efficiency.
Care providers can analyze the information and decide whether to proceed with a course of treatment. Drug developers can take decisions to change or improve the present drugs.
Provide Legal Support:
This is of course an indirect benefit, nonetheless an important one. Often healthcare providers get entangled in legal battles with patients and their relatives, and others. In such cases, data aggregation and data curation can help by providing records and a history of treatment and ailments.
Optimize Hospital Care:
Healthcare data curation can also aid hospitals in providing optimal care and treatment. Clinical notes, laboratory and pathology reports, patient’s combined medical history-all will be readily available through data curation. Hospitals can leverage these data to map optimized treatment plans and patient care.
Data in healthcare must lead to action. There are however some challenges that the data curation process in healthcare faces.
First is data aggregation. It is the process of collecting data from multiple sources to gather interconnected and shareable information. Data aggregation, for example, is essential for healthcare providers to learn not just about an individual case but thousands of similar cases and devise action plans accordingly.
The second is data management. It is the process of methodically arranging data in digital form. All forms of health records from digital to written notes need to be carefully managed. Data management in healthcare enables the integration and analysis of data for better treatment plans and actions.
Data aggregation, data management, and data curation in healthcare have the potential to heavily influence primary care and medical research. Physicians, researchers, and other healthcare professionals can benefit immensely from real word data. Integrating healthcare care management with data curation can create a broad and longitudinal understanding to build a robust healthcare system with better delivery mechanisms.
Summary:
Like many other sectors, the healthcare system is also benefitting immensely from data curation. From analyzing trends to making future predictions to delivering optimal and speedy patient care, data curation is the way to go.
