A Survey of Big Data Issues in Electronic Health Record Analysis

The Electronic Health Record (EHR) groups all digital documents related to a given patient such as anamnesis, results of the laboratory tests, prescriptions, recorded medical signals as ECG or images, etc. Dealing with such data representation incurs a plethora of problems, such as different data types, even unstructured data (i.e., doctor's notes), huge and fast-growing volume, etc. Therefore. EHR should be considered as one of the most complex data objects in the information processing industry. Accordingly, taking into consideration its complexity, heterogeneity, fast growth, and size, the analysis of EHR data increasingly needs big data tools. Such tools should be able to analyze data sets characterized by the so-called 4Vs (volume, velocity, variety, and veracity). These notwithstanding, we should also add the fifth V-value-because analytics tool deployment makes sense only if it leads to health-care improvement (as personalized patient care, decreasing unnecessary hospitalization, or reducing patient readmissions). In this study, we focus on the selected aspects of EHR analysis from the big data perspective.