Health big data analytics: current perspectives, challenges and potential solutions

Modern health information systems can generate several exabytes of patient data, the so called ‘health big data’, per year. Many health managers and experts believe that with the data, it is possible to easily discover useful knowledge to improve health policies, increase patient safety and eliminate redundancies and unnecessary costs. The objective of this paper is to discuss the characteristics of health big data as well as the challenges and solutions for health big data analytics (BDA) – the process of extracting knowledge from sets of health big data – and to design and evaluate a pipelined framework for use as a guideline/reference in health BDA.