Duplicate drug discovery using Hadoop

Rising healthcare costs in recent years has become a major issue for many countries. This is especially prominent as baby boomers reaching their retirement age and thus demanding large shares of a country´s healthcare resources. Consequently, reducing healthcare cost or waste has become a top priority for many governments. However, integrating and analyzing large amount of healthcare data with variety of formats to identify cost saving opportunities is a very complex problem. To help addressing the problem, this paper proposes a Hadoop based approach that can efficiently discover duplicate drug usage by a patient in any given time period. Our experiment results show that our approach can discover cases of duplicate drug prescription much faster, up to 100 times faster, compared to a traditional approach using relational data warehouse.