By Abba Ado Musa
As the largest African population country, Nigeria needs to set foot into big data analysis to accelerate and improve the healthcare system in the country.
In January 2018 according to the New England Journal of Medicine defines Big Data in healthcare as abundant health data amassed from numerous resources including electronic health records (EHR), medical imaging, genomic sequence, payor record, pharmaceutical research, etc.
Big Data in healthcare is a crucial technique to derive reliable information and knowledge that will be needful for healthcare professionals, government, scientist and pharmaceutical industries, big data in health not only provide information, but also assist in detecting a disease outbreak, treatment and prevention of disease, and it’s also aid for scientific research.
The knowledge that has been procured from big data analysis gives clinical insight for healthcare workers to diagnose and treats and rehabilitate patients.
While still on the covid 19 pandemic, big data analysis it’s been used as an essential method for diagnosis, detection, treatment, and drugs discovery of the covid 19 pandemic, in his interview, the director of the national institute of allergy and infectious disease USA Anthony Fauci claimed that he rigorously inspect data before making any further conclusion regarding with the pandemic.
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Big data analysis is an unprecedented method that predicts the future outbreak, epidemics, and prevention of disease. Here in Nigeria, we do not have enough standard big data that will aid in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, as the largest African population big data analysis is an ultimate remedy for our healthcare challenges.
We need to obtain data for different disease serotypes that subsists, which will make an impact for scientists, pharma industries healthcare providers, government to identify and expel a wide range of disease pandemics.
Applications of big data analysis in the healthcare system
Among the most substantive application of big data is the diagnosis of diseases, one of the major disputes that we encountered is the misdiagnosis of disease in Nigeria and Africa at large.
There has been transformation by modern computing technology such as data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning that abundantly enhance efficient and accurate diagnosis and treatments of diseases, it also has the capability to mimics human scientist, healthcare professionals in solving healthcare challenges..
Another crucial application of big data analysis in the healthcare system is treatment and drugs discovery, in 2016 Pfizer, one of the largest and profits pharmaceutical company in the world sealed a collaboration with Massachusetts information technology and international business machine (IBM) as it’s members for data analyst, machine learning and artificial intelligence for the synthesis consortium and pharmaceutical discovery.
Just recently a startup company in Singapore named breathonix announced that it has developed a breath test kids that detect covid 19 in 60 seconds which is a breakthrough, says the CEO zhunan jia, using machine learning software, previously the tech company also declare lung cancer detection.
Big Data Analysis is a tremendous technology that enhances accurate diagnosis and treatment of diseases, citing with Abdulsalam Mahmoud and Thecla Ayoka says there is no standard data that will measure the impact of scientific research in Nigeria.
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Besides this, Nigeria needs to leverage into a big data analysis and also to establish parastatals under the ministry of health which will be responsible for the storage of big data in healthcare services that will impact the scientific research and pharmaceutical industries in Nigeria.
Thanks to a start-up company and nonprofit organization called 54 Gene-based Nigeria which is making an effort to accumulate and gather genetic information from the African population in order to compete with the world in terms of precision medicine.
Abba Ado Musa wrote from the Department Of Microbiology
Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto
