An article by Abbas, Ali, Khan, and Khan (2016) titled Personalized healthcare cloud services for disease risk assessment and wellness management using social media provides a prototype framework, which can be used to assess risk factors among all types of population, including youth and younger adults. The framework proposes to use cloud-based software integrated with medical databases and Twitter. During the first stage, the software analyzes twits for using big data and multiple keywords to identify possible risk factors. During the second stage, a health expert overviews the suggestions and provides recommendations based on medical history and analysis offered by the software.
The study was motivated by the fact that more than 72% of people use the Internet to search for health-related information each year (Abbas et al., 2016). However, the lack of professional aid may lead to adverse outcomes due to self-treatment. The preliminary testing demonstrates the high validity and reliability of the framework. One of the lessons learned from the article is that health delivery, effectiveness, and cost-efficiency can be improved considerably by using screening methods convenient for the patient. Moreover, the article made me realize the importance of Big Data for evidence-based decisions.
Reference
Abbas, A., Ali, M., Khan, M. U. S., & Khan, S. U. (2016). Personalized healthcare cloud services for disease risk assessment and wellness management using social media. Pervasive and Mobile Computing, 28, 81-99.