Big Data Architecture in Czech Republic Healthcare Service: Requirements, TPC-H Benchmarks and Vertica

Big data in healthcare has made a positive difference in advancing analytical capabilities and lowering the costs of medical care. In addition to providing analytical capabilities on platforms supporting current and near-future AI with machine-learning and data-mining algorithms, there is also a need for ethical considerations mandating new ways to preserve privacy, all of which are preconditioned by the growing body of regulations and expectations. The purpose of this study is to improve existing clinical care by implementing a big data platform for the Czech Republic National Health Service. Based on the achieved performance and its compliance with mandatory guidelines, the reported big-data platform was selected as the winning solution from the Czech Republic national tender (Tender Id. VZ0036628, No. Z2017-035520). The platform, based on analytical Vertica NoSQL database for massive data processing, complies with the TPC-H1 for decision support benchmark, the European Union (EU) and the Czech Republic requirements, well-exceeding defined system performance thresholds. The reported artefacts and concepts are transferrable to healthcare systems in other countries and are intended to provide personalised autonomous assessment from big data in a cost-effective, scalable and high-performance manner. The implemented platform allows: (1) scalability; (2) further implementations of newly-developed machine learning algorithms for classification and predictive analytics; (3) security improvements related to Electronic Health Records (EHR) by using automated functions for data encryption and decryption; and (4) the use of big data to allow strategic planning in healthcare.