JAMA: Opportunities and challenges for big data

A viewpoint published by the Journal of the American Medical Association covers the opportunities and barriers of big data in healthcare.

"We suggest that leveraging the collection of patient and practitioner data could be an important way to improve quality and efficiency of healthcare delivery," wrote Travis B. Murdoch, MD, MSc, at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, and Allen S. Detsky, MD, PhD, of the Institute for Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto. "Much of this rich data set is currently perceived as a by-product of healthcare delivery, rather than a central asset to improve its efficiency."

The authors listed the following four ways big data may advance the economic mission of healthcare delivery by improving quality and efficiency:

• Big data may greatly expand the capacity to generate new knowledge.
• Big data may help with knowledge dissemination.
• Big data may help translate personalized medicine initiatives into clinical practice by offering the opportunity to use analytical capabilities that can integrate systems biology (e.g., genomics) with EHR data.
• Big data may allow for a transformation of healthcare by delivering information directly to patients, empowering them to play a more active role.

There also are several important barriers to the widespread adoption of big data in healthcare, they wrote. Privacy, fragmented EHR platforms lacking interoperability and safety concerns are a few.

"The application of big data to healthcare is inevitable," wrote the authors. "The first information technology revolution in medicine was the digitization of the medical record. The second is surely to leverage the information contained therein and combine it with other sources. Big data has the potential to transform medical practice by using information generated every day to improve the quality and efficiency of care."