Healthcare Misses Big Data Boat

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

The healthcare industry continues to underuse the incredible amount of biomedical data available to it.

Big data that can measure trends through EHRs, biomedical imaging, and data generated by researchers is an “untapped” resource according to Health Data Management. A recent study by researchers at Harvard argues healthcare is utilizing the information held in big data far less than other industries do. For example politics, government, and business are using this wealth of information to improve their strategies.

Researchers write, in an article posted on the JAMA site, “Linking big data will enable physicians and researchers to test new hypotheses and identify areas of possible intervention. For example, do grocery shopping patterns obtained from stores in various areas predict rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes in public health databases? Does level of exercise recorded by home monitoring devices correlate with response rates of cholesterol-lowering drugs, as measured by continued refills at the pharmacy?

“The first challenge in using big biomedical data effectively is to identify what the potential sources of health care information are and to determine the value of linking these together,” continue researchers. “Although some big data, such as electronic health records (EHRs), provide depth by including multiple types of data (e.g., images, notes, etc.) about individual patient encounters, others such as claims data provide longitudinality - a view of a patient’s medical history over an extended period for a narrow range of categories.”

Researchers concluded that linking data from other resources is of great value as well, “With this in mind, it becomes easier to see how nontraditional sources of biomedical data outside of the health care system fit into the picture. Social media, credit card purchases, census records, and numerous other types of data, despite varying degrees of quality, can help assemble a holistic view of a patient, and, in particular, shed light on social and environmental factors that may be influencing health.”