ABSTRACT
Healthcare is one of the largest sectors in India in terms of revenue. With the spread of the unpredictable and devastating COVID-19 pandemic, it has become imperative for the healthcare industry, especially in a country like India, to adopt modern-day tools and techniques to handle the increasing burden on the sector. The digitization and virtual mode of conducting business for healthcare-related services, hospital management, medical equipment manufacturing, and medicines supply chain have resulted in the generation of huge amounts of data. Additionally, with the changing of healthcare dynamics each day and given the criticality of the industry for a huge population such as India’s, it is more important than ever to use data analytics to derive useful information and further help industry stakeholders to better cater to the needs of society. Recent literature has described big data use cases in healthcare and government and to predict emergency situations. Reviews of big data in healthcare emphasize its importance for cost reduction, an essential requirement for a developing country like India if conducted on a large scale. Work presented in [1] concludes that big data analytics has huge potential in the healthcare sector for gaining insight into data repositories and hence making informed decisions. Given the value addition provided by big data to the healthcare sector, researchers have been using it for a variety of applications. For instance, work in [2] proposes internet of things architecture to process big data for healthcare applications, especially wearable devices for health monitoring. In addition, several conceptual big data architectures for healthcare are proposed in the literature. This chapter reviews big data analytics in healthcare, considering the effects of COVID-19 and similar situations. In addition to its impact on researchers and the practitioners, it is hoped that the work will help stakeholders to better analyze their operations in these turbulent times.
