2015, big data in healthcare: for whom the bell tolls?

Excerpt

The health care sector generates bountiful data around the clock, which can paradoxically complicate our quest for information, knowledge, and ‘wisdom’ [1]. It may be prudent that medical end-users consider seriously a fundamental change that would allow us to gain full value from the ‘big data’ that the health care section is generating [2]. Proponents of the big data revolution suggest that the value for physicians rests on the added information provided by big data analysis. Indeed, supplementary information could clarify areas for improvement, such as optimization of treatments, reduced adverse events and readmission rates, earlier identification of those patients whose health is worsening, and more efficient identification of populations in need. Recent cloud computing has even turned computing and software into commodity services, and such big data processing seems to be forging a technology revolution [3,4]. However, opponents of the big data revolution speculate that validation and impact analyses of big data in health care are still in their infancy, and approaches such as Google’s baseline study may thus not be effective in preventing disease, and possibly even lead to unnecessary, if not harmful, interventions [5]. …