Challenges in designing an online healthcare platform for personalised patient analytics

The growing number and size of clinical medical records (CMRs) represents new opportunities for finding meaningful patterns and patient treatment pathways while at the same time presenting a huge challenge for clinicians. Indeed, CMR repositories share many characteristics of the classical `big data' problem, requiring specialised expertise for data management, extraction, and modelling. In order to help clinicians make better use of their time to process data, they will need more adequate data processing and analytical tools, beyond the capabilities offered by existing general purpose database management systems or database servers. One modelling technique that can readily benefit from the availability of big data, yet remains relatively unexplored is personalised analytics where a model is built for each patient. In this paper, we present a strategy for designing a secure healthcare platform for personalised analytics by focusing on three aspects: (1) data representation, (2) data privacy and security, and (3) personalised analytics enabled by machine learning algorithms.