Discussion: Big Data Risks and Rewards
When you wake in the morning, you may reach for your cell phone to reply to a few text or email messages that you missed overnight. On your drive to work, you may stop to refuel your car. Upon your arrival, you might swipe a key card at the door to gain entrance to the facility. And before finally reaching your workstation, you may stop by the cafeteria to purchase a coffee.

From the moment you wake, you are in fact a data-generation machine. Each use of your phone, every transaction you make using a debit or credit card, even your entrance to your place of work, creates data. It begs the question: How much data do you generate each day? Many studies have been conducted on this, and the numbers are staggering: Estimates suggest that nearly 1 million bytes of data are generated every second for every person on earth.  Big Data Risks and Rewards Essay Discussion Paper

As the volume of data increases, information professionals have looked for ways to use big data—large, complex sets of data that require specialized approaches to use effectively. Big data has the potential for significant rewards—and significant risks—to healthcare. In this Discussion, you will consider these risks and rewards.

To Prepare:

Review the Resources and reflect on the web article Big Data Means Big Potential, Challenges for Nurse Execs.
Reflect on your own experience with complex health information access and management and consider potential challenges and risks you may have experienced or observed.

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Big Data Risks and Rewards

Reflect on your own experience with complex health information access and management and consider potential challenges and risks you may have experienced or observed.

Big data within health care is a significant concern, especially in the face of advanced technologies that are constantly collecting large amounts of complex data. In fact, when considering data relevancy, it is not unusual to drown in large amounts of data that have implications for care decisions. For instance, prescribing medication for geriatric patients has become more difficult since virtually every demographic factor can influence response to medication such that the demographic information must be taken into account when determining an appropriate prescription medication and dosage (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2018).

In dealing with big data, there are three potential challenges and risks. Firstly, data privacy concerns as health information is sensitive since it includes personal information. There is a need to guard against data breath when there is so much confidential information being handled as failure to do so could affect critical data, have a negative impact on the organization’s reputation, and lead to legal action with penalties. Besides that, data privacy is a compliance necessity (Zaccagnini & White, 2017). Secondly, there is a risk of incompetent analytics. With so much information, it is difficult to determine what should be analyzed, what should be ignored, and what analytics tools should be used. Proper analytics is necessary to make the data meaningful while offering valuable insights that guide strategic plans and decisions. If the analytics is wrong, then the data would be misinterpreted resulting in wrong decisions. Thirdly, there is a cost management challenge. Accessing and managing large data involves costs. Large data would be costlier but more useful for decision making, while little data would be less costly and less useful for decision making (Hoffman, 2017). There is a need to address these potential challenges and risks in order to improve complex health information access and management.

References

Hoffman, S. (2017). Electronic Health Records and Medical Big Data: Law and Policy. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

McGonigle, D., & Mastrian, K. (2018). Nursing Informatics and the Foundation of Knowledge (4^th ed.). Jones and Bartlett Learning.

Zaccagnini, M., & White, K. (Eds.) (2017). The Doctor of Nursing Practice Essentials: A New Model for Advanced Practice Nursing (3rd ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning, LLC.  Big Data Risks and Rewards Essay Discussion Paper