Using data science & big data analytics to make healthcare green

Abstract

The environmental impact of the healthcare sector has become an important factor globally and is continuing to draw the attention of regulators. The energy use of the healthcare sector (whose largest sub-segment is 'hospitals') has been growing due to many factors. These factors include the rapid growth and adoption of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in healthcare. The new IT technologies and applications used in healthcare include 'cloud computing', `mMedicine', i.e. `mobility in Health', eHealth, and tele(health) care for `remote delivery of healthcare services'. The healthcare industry needs to reap the benefits of emerging technologies such as Data Science, Big Data, Analytics, Mobile computing and Cloud computing, along with the use of Health Information Technology (HIT) to help solve the ever growing operating cost problems. A big challenge facing the healthcare sector is how best to improve the energy efficiency and sustainability of this very complex sector. The work done over the past few years to analyze and create very energy efficient data centers presents an excellent opportunity for cost effective green IT at hospitals. Because of the complexity of the healthcare industry, there is a need for an extensive use of data science and Big Data analytics as an ideal way to help determine how the green healthcare outcomes can be improved. Hospitals and healthcare can make significant steps in the green direction by combining big data analytics with cloud computing. Information Technology (IT) is continually being refreshed at hospitals and most organizations as part of the need for the hospitals to keep vital technology up to date. Any electronic waste (eWaste) from this refresh cycle must be recycled as part of a sustainability program. Replacing the IT equipment and upgrading the application architecture with energy efficient systems such as virtual servers, virtual data storage, and efficient application and database structures, can easily reduce IT power consumption for the replaced equipment by 50 percent. A second compelling reason to move to green IT is that virtual server and virtual data storage technology are methods that allow hospitals to reduce equipment and system management costs. Include private cloud computing for both your production and test / development systems, and the savings are even greater. So the latest green technology is based around a very solid business case without even considering the savings due to reduction in energy costs. This paper gives examples of how Data Science, Big Data, and Analytics can be used in healthcare to significantly improve a hospital's IT Energy Efficiency along with information on the best ways to improve energy efficiency for healthcare in a cost effective manner. This paper builds on the work done in other sectors (mainly data centers) in effectively measuring and improving IT energy efficiency.