Big Data Driven Healthcare Supply Chain : Understanding Potentials and Capabilities

Increasing costs and operational inefficiency in healthcare supply chain has drawn the attention of professionals and researchers worldwide. A competent supply chain can provide a tighter control and visibility of greater focus on quality patient care. Today, Big Data Analytics (BDA) is progressively being adopted with the determination of building treasured information from big data. The analytic process, including positioning and use of BDA tools improves operational efficiency and help in reducing human errors that can often be deadly. Recent studies show that better healthcare planning can be done by the usage of Big Data. Suitable methods and practices can be used for healthcare data analytics which can help in better decision making for an increase in the business value and customer interest. However, the usage and applicability of BDA tools in the healthcare supply chain sector is a relatively new phenomenon as compared to other service sectors like e-commerce, finance.This paper is an effort to explore the implementation of BDA tools in the healthcare supply chain settings of hospitals for quality improvements and better patient care. The paper then summaries a number of challenges and opportunities connected with the employment of Big Data in the environment of health care supply chain services