Customer spotlight: Treato uses big data to reveal health insights

In today’s Internet-driven society, many of us choose to “ask Google” for information on countless topics – including questions about our health and prescription drugs. A staggering amount of data exists in online health communities where patients compare notes about their conditions, medications and treatments. While the Internet is no substitute for consulting with a medical professional, a startup company called Treato is using big data analytics to bridge the gap between patients, pharmaceutical companies and healthcare providers.

Treato, a big data startup based in Israel, aims to provide meaningful insights from the plethora of information in online health forums. By extracting, aggregating and analyzing data from blogs and other qualified health websites, Treato “creates the big picture of what people say about their medications and conditions.” The resulting analytics are available for free to consumers and as a brand intelligence service for pharmaceutical marketers.

Treato is experiencing rapid growth, and traffic on their website has already surpassed 100,000 visits per day. In addition to acquiring new site users, the amount of data from source content has expanded. To handle increased site traffic and content, Treato recently added a new Internap data center near Dallas, Texas.

Data centers are a critical aspect of Treato’s strategy to expand its world-class SaaS infrastructure. In addition to supporting Treato.com and the Treato Pharma applications, data centers process and store the content collected from online health blogs and forum posts. Advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) analysis is used to extract relevant information from this data, ultimately providing insights that can influence future patient experiences.

High availability – Expanding its data center footprint allows Treato to reduce the risk of downtime for the site and backend processing capabilities. With a growing number of users relying on their analytics, resilient infrastructure helps ensure a positive online experience.

Increased capacity – Thanks to the expanded data center space, Treato has enlarged their capacity by 150%. With their new 200-terabyte Hadoop cluster, Treato can process 150% more patient conversations per day.

Scalability – As a result of this increased capacity, Treato can expand its sources of content even further, and expects to invest significantly in this area moving forward. More than a million patient conversations are added each day, perpetually expanding the knowledge base available to Treato visitors.

Using big data analytics to glean consumer insights is a rapidly growing business strategy that is still evolving today. By successfully applying this concept to real-time healthcare data, Treato is opening new doors for the advancement of healthcare. The use of data centers for expanding storage and processing capacity will be an essential factor in achieving analytics goals. While the Internet still can’t diagnose your ailment, it can work together with big data to create better, healthier lives.