Data Collection and Processing in Health Care

Data collection and processing are used to gather information and enables one to answer the relevant questions. There is a need for collecting and processing data in every field like humanities, social science, engineering, business, etc. They play an important role in health care services as well. The volume of data in the health care sector increases exponentially day by day, hence the collection of data becomes not only important but also a tedious job as well. The data collection and its storage is a bigger problem for health sector organizations since it is huge and costly. These organizations take needful efforts in collecting the data by applying different methods and store them in their database, which can be shared with other organizations or to the government under few conditions. After the collection and maintenance of data, the processing step takes place which has its own pros and cons. The data collected has to be processed in order to get the analysis for that particular set of data. Based on the analysis, different steps could be taken by the health organizations in order to achieve their task. Every year millions of dollars are spent on data collection and processing in order to keep the system up to date. One can simply predict how arduous and gruesome data collection and processing in the healthcare sector can be. This chapter provides the overview of various concepts used for data collection and storage.