Fiscal concerns are paramount in the rise of Big Data within healthcare, according to a recent McKinsey analysis, but clinical trends also play a role.
Healthcare expenses are now 17.6% of GDP—nearly $600 billion more than the expected benchmark for a nation of the United States’s size and wealth, notes the consultancy, which did a regression analysis of countries’ income and spending data.
Payors are seeking to clamp costs by shifting from fee-for-service compensation to risk-sharing arrangements that prioritize outcomes, as well as partnering with pharma and basing reimbursement on drugs’ ability to improve health. McKinsey also cites the move toward evidence-based medicine, with its reliance on aggregating individual data sets into big-data algorithms.
Healthcare could soon catch up to other sectors in using Big Data, as first movers in the data sphere are already achieving positive results.
From the May 01, 2013 Issue of MM+M - Medical Marketing and Media