The adoption of big data techniques in the capturing, processing and storage of health data was necessitated by the need to improve healthcare quality and patient outcomes.Big Data applications have huge potentials, especially with the availability of huge and growing healthcare data to transform and improve patient monitoring operations, which in turn can help in early detection of diseases, mitigation and the cure of diseases based on historic data. This could also help identify the best treatment for a patient’s specific circumstance, thus improving personalized treatment in patients.Designing effective Big Data applications in healthcare presents some challenges such as real-time data analysis, data privacy, data integration and system interoperability. This paper examines the challenges and opportunities associated with designing Big Data applications for healthcare monitoring, providing insights into the requirements for data architecture, interoperability, security, and real-time analytics.