Big data in healthcare: a discussion on the big challenges

Our century has been described as the electronic age and every day new technologies or applications, that generate data with exponential rates, are emerged. As a consequence, all and more organizations are facing the problem of managing large amounts of data. Generally, the large amount of data and their handling, storage and analysis is referred as Big Data. The emerging field of Big Data poses many challenges for healthcare organizations, as healthcare data and information increases. The paper describes the emerging era of Big Data in the field of health care and focuses on their benefits, challenges and ethics providing a broad overview for healthcare researchers, practitioners and health policy makers. Furthermore, we proposed a three-dimensional model for assessing Big Data concerns in the medical context. The paper is not intended to be a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art of Big Data technology, but rather to raise the awareness of the considerations that healthcare professionals may face or will face in the near future. © 2016, IUPESM and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.