Big Data will change the way we practice, fund, and regulate medicine. Patients and clinicians need to know how this will impact them.

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This post asks “What is Big Data?“, “How Will It Help Healthcare?“, and “What Should We Watch out for?“

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We hear about it when giant companies collect every mouse click, or every second you spend on each website you visit.  Data sets balloon in size and complexity beyond what common computing can handle.

 
Now imagine collecting every bit of information to do with healthcare: labs, x-rays, clinic visits, public health data, billing data, payer databases, electronic medical records, pharmaceutical databases…everything.

You could imagine it’s a giant vacuum and catalogue system for structured and unstructured data; anything an organization or industry might want. To learn more check out:  Big Data Revolution, McKinsey website, Wikipedia.

How Will It Impact Healthcare?

• transparency improves
• detailed information become available
• accuracy sharpens
• storage capacity expands
• analytics improve quality, accountability, and decision-making for individuals and groups

What Should We Watch Out For?

• privacy presents the biggest challenge
• control by non-experts:  insurance companies, government
• relevance – should be relevant to healthcare not general interest
• improvement – not punitive
• abuse:  people/governments/companies using data for personal gain; creating value only for themselves
• confusing correlation with causation – data will show associations that might have no relation to causality
• limits – Should we collect everything? Personal details?
• overuse – Big Data is a sledgehammer that might be used for everything when simpler approaches would be more cost-effective (big data problems)

Big Data is here. How are we going to benefit patients with it?