The next big thing in health care appears to be “Big Data” — the voluminous amounts of information spewed from new technologies and electronic health records. Big Data can tell us which treatments work and which don’t, how best to deliver care and how to make care more accessible. A report last year by McKinsey and Company estimated that the U.S. health care sector could add more than $300 billion in value a year by plumbing secrets amassed in Big Data.
Big Data also is seen as advancing personalized care, with the cloud and supercomputers such as IBM’s Watson able to store and process huge amounts of information to reveal which treatments work best for the genomic makeup of a particular individual.
“If Watson can already observe tons and tons of data — and it sits there day after day, it doesn’t take breaks, it doesn’t take lunches — these computers when given enough data can actually find patterns that might lead to real cures or better treatments,” Shahid Shah, CEO of the IT consulting firm Netspective Communications, said in an article in Health Care IT News.
A challenge will be to pair mined data with information captured in the electronic health record, the article notes.
A November article in Forbes observes that new sources of information are proliferating:
“New types and sources of health care data have become available – or soon will – and in overwhelming quantity. The federal government is investing $20 billion in Electronic Health Records; industry is developing new electronic transaction standards; and innovators like PatientsLikeMe, 23andMe, Fitbit and Zeo are helping people generate and share their own data. The era of Big Data in healthcare has arrived.”
Can all these efforts dovetail for maximum benefit?
“We must start producing better evidence faster and on a large scale,” the Forbes article asserts. “Before we can reduce costs and deliver meaningful improvements in outcomes, we must have meaningful evidence. Without it, we can never know what works, and for whom.”
The promise of Big Data can be seen in the Veterans Health Administration, where mined data from its VistA electronic record — generally agreed to be the most successful such EHR in the nation — has produced such advances in care as the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (since adopted as a national program of the American College of Surgeons).
The future of Big in health care is enticing. Advances in computing allow us to view massive amounts of information, and to use it in new ways. The trick will be to make sure we do it wisely, and well.
