Big Data in Healthcare: Intensive Care Units as a Case Study

Traditional medical practice is moving from relatively ad-hoc and subjective decision making to modern evidence-based healthcare. Evidence is based on data collected from: electronic health record (EHR) systems; genomic information; capturing devices, sensors, and mobiles; information communicated verbally by the patient; and new medical knowledge. These resources produce a collection of large and complex datasets, which are difficult to process using common database management tools or traditional data processing applications.