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1. Introduction
Spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage (sICH) incurs a high medical expenditure, especially emergency and intensive care facilities [1,2]. Meanwhile, many sICH patients have multiple chronic conditions [2,3]. Both hypertension and diabetes mellitus are found to be the most frequent comorbidities of the sICH patients before being attacked [2,3]. Continuity of care for the patients with the comorbidities will decrease the risk of sICH [3]. It is the key performance index for the quality of care for chronic diseases. Disparity in health care facilities between rural areas and urban areas is huge [4,5,6]. There are significantly different incidences in some diseases and public health problems in rural area due to different health care accessibilities. That the rural areas have fewer health care facilities and this fact will influence the outcome of health care [6]. Socioeconomic status and educational status also influence health care accessibility and the outcome of health care [5,7,8]. Stroke patients in China of a lower income status, lower educational status and rural location were found to have higher mortality rates [7]. Thus, it is important to analyze the different status in sICH between rural and urban regions with big data.
The concept of big data has been defined as four Vs: Large amount of data (volume), diversity of the structure of the data (variety), quick data access and data management (velocity), and the quality of being true and real-world data (veracity) [9]. Many researchers used administrative data related to health care [1]. However, few researchers have integrated these data with other government open data. This study integrated Taiwan National Health Insurance data [10,11,12] which covered 99% of Taiwan’s population (about 23 million residents) and government open data which including household registration database of the Department of Household Registration (http://www.ris.gov.tw/en/web/ris3-english/home) [13], the 2010 population and housing census (http://ebas1.ebas.gov.tw/phc2010/chinese/rchome.htm) [14], smoker statistics data and Taiwan Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data (https://data.gov.tw/) [15] and using big data analytics and visualization tools to evaluate the status of sICH in rural and urban areas of Taiwan.
2. Materials and Methods
2.1. Data Source
This study integrated the National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD), the household registration database of the Department of Household Registration, the 2010 population and housing census, and the Government Open Data Platform in Taiwan with...