Web Scraping Public Data for the Healthcare Sector

The US Healthcare market is a huge industry with the US National health spending projected to reach $5.7 trillion by 2026.
Moreover, with the rise of telemedicine, AI-enabled medical devices and blockchain electronic health records, digital transformation in the healthcare industry is now more visible than ever.

Web scraping is a highly effective way for healthcare companies to improve business efficiency and offer better and targeted services to their customers.

What Data Can Be Scraped?

Healthcare related sites can be scraped for public information on the following data fields: 

1. Name, specializations & other relevant details of doctors and other providers
2. Hospital, Urgent Care  and Clinic locations
3. Health insurance plan enrollment for individual providers and hospitals  
4. Medical equipment and related products
5. Drug pricing
6. Locations of hospitals/clinics that provide treatments for specific illnesses
7. Online reviews of various hospitals and providers
8. Public healthcare data that supports scientific research and public health research
9. Pharmacy and drug development product information
10. Job related data to identify competitor development pipelines or growth plans

Benefits of Scraping the Web for Public Healthcare Data

Recent research on ‘Healthcare Analytics and Big Data’ by Oracle revealed that 50 Petabytes of data would be available in the healthcare industry. With medical insurance details, compliance, regulatory requirements and scientific data, the sector is home to a wealth of data. This data can be used for the following purposes to generate valuable insights:

Public health research

Large volumes of information are scattered on search engines and social media channels. Through web scraping, you can easily sift through multiple websites & use the gathered data to:

1. Derive crucial insights
2. Map trends in population health
3. Make meaningful treatment decisions. 

Monitor pricing

Web scraping can help you in:

1. Keeping track of your competitors
2. Monitoring the pricing trend of drugs
3. Aligning your pricing to make maximum profits
4. Determine the reputation of brands

Competitive analysis 

Web scrapers can extract data from the web to monitor your competitor brands on offering services and satisfying patients. Information on:

1. Hospitalization costs 
2. Insurance policies accepted 
3. Technological capabilities can be collected and used in making strategic business decisions. 

You can thereby consolidate your market position and gain an edge over your competitors. In addition, the Google Reviews Scraper can be used to scrape review sites and collect people’s opinions regarding you and your competitors.  

Extracting data from health discussion forums

Web forums come in different structures, and manually obtaining the right set of data points can be challenging. Through web scraping, essential public data on:

1. Disease detection (based on symptoms)
2. Adverse drug reactions 
3. Clinical test suggestions for diseases

ScrapeHero’s Custom Web Scraping Solutions

ScrapeHero offers end-to-end enterprise-grade data scraping services to thousands of customers across the globe. Data gathered from target sites is structured and presented in CSV, JSON, or Excel formats.