Mathematics

One of the complexity dimensions for healthcare is the massive data it generates. In 2012, the estimated size of the data generated by worldwide digital healthcare was 500 petabytes (a petabyte is 10 15 bytes or 1 million gigabytes). The growth of healthcare data size is projected to continue exponentially. By 2020, healthcare data is expected to reach the size of 25,000 petabytes (Sun & Reddy, 2013). Thus, healthcare sector indeed has the "Big Data" challenge. The ever-rising growth of healthcare data will serve no purpose unless it helps the sector. The essential question is "Can Big Data and Data Analytics used by healthcare help it learn from the past to become 'smart' in the future?" There is already a thought on moving from "treatment-based" practices to "outcome-based" practices. If people do not get the cure in spite of the large expenditures on IT in healthcare, then it is a losing battle for the sector.

This chapter describes significant ways that data science (Provost & Fawcett, 2013) can be used to make healthcare green (Godbole & Lamb, 2015). Here are the four big reasons why healthcare needs data science from a 2015 IDG report. Reason 1: Hospital Claims Data In 2010, there were 35.1 million discharges in the United States, with an average length of stay of 4.8 days according to the National Hospital Discharge Survey. That same survey went on to note that there were 51.4 million procedures performed. The National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey in 2011 stated that the number of outpatient department visits was 125.7 million with 136.3 million emergency department visits. These are some of the basic figures showing the amount of care the US healthcare system has provided. Using data science to annualize this sort of data allows healthcare providers to start building a new intuition built on a data narrative that could possibly help avoid the spread of diseases or address specific health threats. Using a combination of descriptive statistics, exploratory data analysis, and predictive analytics, it becomes relatively easy to identify the most cost-effective treatments for specific ailments and allows for a process to help reduce the number of duplicate or unnecessary treatments. The power in predicting a future state is in using that knowledge to change the behavior patterns of today.

The case studies described in this chapter include examples of how green healthcare can not only help "save the planet" from global warming but also save the healthcare system significant money. So, green healthcare is a true "win-win" opportunity. Not only do you help society in the battle to combat climate change, but you save money doing it! It should be noted that the case studies in Chaps. 10 and 11 also give examples of how green healthcare saves money, but the focus in Chap. 10 is green healthcare opportunities in US hospitals, and the focus in Chap. 11 is how green healthcare is being practiced worldwide. The significant value in looking at green healthcare case studies, for both large and small healthcare facilities, should be to take the opportunity to take advantage of the case study lessons learned. Examples of How Greening the Medical Center Saves Money The following sections give examples of the different ways that green healthcare can save money. Hospitals Save Money by "Going Green" Much of the following information was taken (with permission) from the following article (http://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/hospitals-save-money-goinggreen). Pocketbook environmentalism is powerful. If marketers can help consumers understand the hidden costs in products and services that are not environmentally friendly, they can grab consumers' attention.

Green practices in the healthcare domain are the need of the hour considering the climate change challenge. A discussion about the importance of "green healthcare" for our planet is presented in Chap. 1. As mentioned there, being able to extend the REACH of healthcare services is one of the three challenges being faced by healthcare worldwide; the other two being "how to reduce the COST of healthcare services delivery" and "how to improve the QUALITY of healthcare services." The discussion in this chapter is important from the REACH as well as COST perspective. The first part of this chapter presents a discussion about "telemedicine" from the perspective of "greening" of the healthcare industry as well as reducing the costs of healthcare service delivery. The second part of the chapter is about the role of "virtualization" in that context. We begin by understanding the concept of green IT in the context of healthcare. Next, we introduce and explain some of the important terms related to "telemedicine," and in the next section, a discussion about the term "telemedicine" is presented.