A disruptive Big data approach to leverage the efficiency in management and clinical decision support in a Hospital

There is an urgent need to potentiate evidence-based clinical-decision-making with a holistic, patient-centered approach to value, one that focuses both on health-care spending and treatment outcomes.1 On the other hand, in the era of self-driven vehicles, computer systems in healthcare need also to become proactive and to identify relevant clinical patterns in a much faster and automated way than currently used solutions enable. Although this is the state-of-the-art paradigm, in fact, technical constraints block further developments in these areas as hospitals lack the skills to really manage and take value from the big amount of Data about their patients that is stored in dozens of heterogeneous information systems, from lab results to imaging studies, from pharmacy to the Electronic Medical Record (EMR). At São João Hospital Center (São João), a novel analytics platform was conceived, a new approach that is able to leverage all the Big Data that is stored about hospital patients in seconds and to apply some of the most advanced and lightening speed analytics on top of this information in order to empower clinicians and to give them a new decision support tool. This sets the road towards a data-driven hospital of the future, where Data Analytics and Data Science can become as important as the most recent Harrison's edition. With this analytics platform, São João was able to be the first Non-Us institution to ever win the Microsoft U.S Worldwide Innovation Award (HIMSS - Florida, 2014) and the European Big Data & Analytics solution of the year (IT EUROPA - London, 2014). This solution is called HVITAL (Hospital surVeiIlance, moniToring and ALert) and is working 24/7 at São João Hospital since 2012.