Hortonworks Data Platform is a good choice for clinical data monitoring and analysis
December 13, 2018
Hortonworks Data Platform is a good choice for clinical data monitoring and analysis
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Hortonworks Data Platform
My company is a non-profit healthcare delivery institute consists of hospitals and clinics. We started a new working group to see possibility of using big data technology with machine learning to improve patient care and healthcare quality improvement. We adopted HortonWorks data platform to store and analyze data from medical devices in our Intensive Care Units. Our ICU has a lot of devices that monitor patients' status in real time and detect any abnormal pattern. Since it produces numerous data, we stored them in a volatile manner, which means they may be deleted after while, to save disk space in our databases. We did pilot study of using Hortonworks Data Platform and Hadoop inside it to replace traditional data storage.
- It is a well suited data platform to support big data storage and analysis, with computational efficiency, good performance, and stability.
- It is free to use. Online development community is well supported. Hortonworks engineers seem to have good experience and skill sets.
- It is easy and fast to integrate with other tools or components for big data handling and analysis.
- Since it doesn't come with propriety tools for big data management, additional integration is need (for query handling, search, etc).
- It was very straightforward to store clinical data without relations, such as data from sensors of a medical device. But it has limitations when needed to combine the data with other clinical data in structured format (e.g. lab results, diagnosis).
- Overall look and feel of front-end management tools (e.g. monitoring) are not good. It is not bad but it doesn't look professional.
- My company is expanding our scope of data science area from traditional structured data (coded diagnosis, medication, etc) to unstructured data. Use of Hortonworks in ICU data monitoring was a good demonstration of that possibility.
- Hortonworks data platform is a fully open source product and well aligned with out development culture.
- Hortonworks business people and engineers are supportive and open minded. They played certain role of successful use of Hortonworks.
Cloudera has been often compared to Hortonworks. We considered the both products and decided to try Hortonworks data platform, by several reasons. One of them was pricing and technical support. Generally speaking Cloudera outperforms Hortonworks in terms of functionalities, but Hortonworks was easy to learn for our first-time use big data analysts and developer. Its tutorials were great as well.