Social-sanitary big data framework

The growing number of medical research on the web shows that the health and healthcare are increasingly digital. In order to ensure the safety of citizens, social cohesion, and economic competitiveness at a national level, the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can facilitate knowledge and exchange of data through an analytical approach to problem solving, through continuous improvement of statistical managing of Big Data also in the healthcare field. The new technologies have become essential, thanks to the enormous possibilities that they can offer: we have witnessed over a very short period of time, that most of the human activities which were carried out manually have given space to much more efficient digital implementations. For instance, we can consider the serious problems that the vast documental archives have created in its management, and how centralized computer databases helped to solve most of these problems, speeding up and optimizing all research operations and data mining. This natural easiness of data exchange is still being expanded and facilitated by the development of computer networks, and in particular by the internet. Despite progress made in recent years, the quality of the data is still one of the critical aspects of statistical production in the social-sanitary field and is partly due to the lack of accurate data provided by the peripheral structures, where the measurements are still in course of automation. Another factor that adversely affects the quality of the information consists of the delay time between the occurrence of the underlying events and the recording of related data: these, in fact, sometimes they are not inserted immediately in information systems and are then retrieved at a later time. ICT offers possible solutions, improving the administration and helping to streamline procedures and reduce costs. Moreover, the problems of data reliability, the provision of appropriate classifications in survey forms and, more generally, the quality of data are attributable, directly or indirectly, to the degree of computerization in social-sanitary production. In fact, in the presence of a fully computerized detection system, the possibility of errors transcription, manipulation and interpretation of the required information will drastically reduce (due to the non-perfect correspondence between the classification adopted in models of detection and what is recovered in the official records), as well as the time-lag in some cases considerable, between data recording and the actual time/instant of reference; on the other hand, the detailing of the information collected could increase a result of a greater and more appropriate articulation of the detection patterns (certainly not feasible, beyond a given limit, in cases of manual detection) and the activation of an automatic check on the consistency of the data would be possible, not only ex-post, but also during the same stage in which information is entered. In reference to electronic health records, the Legislative Decree 179/2012 published in the Official Gazette of 11 November 2015 defines the set of health Big data and digital socio-sanitary documents generated from clinical present and past events: each one generates big data receiving a prescription, buying a medicine, requiring a health service, accessing to the emergency room, undergoing a diagnostic or laboratory examination, using social networks to communicate health conditions. Cross analysing this information, policy makers, hospitals and clinics could prevent the most common diseases and balance healthcare services according to the real needs of the population in a given territory. The application of these concepts to social-sanitary activities has opened a new and interesting line of research considered as a matter that unfolds on interoperability between the systems of public administration and the ICT. The crucial role of big data in healthcare is therefore to use the already considerable amount of existing information to avoid waste and to concentrate financial resources in sectors and medical specialties really needed by citizens.