Ellis Island Public Health Service Physicians flickr user NIAID
Public Health Data Ambitions Outpace Available Tools
Privacy is acutely important in the discussion on big health data, but another challenge is prior even to confidentiality concerns.
The word was officially out after NIH announced its commitment of $96 million to establish Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Centers last year -- the vast industry plagued by inefficiency is embracing big data to improve the quality of healthcare in this country. Software company Truveris yesterday introduced a modelling system that will increase transparency surrounding changes in pharmaceutical prices; Nextgov reported this week on DARPA’s new crowdsourcing project to forecast the spread of the deadly Chikungunya virus; Defense One showed us how genes might predict PTSD. Policy analysts, physicians, and journalists continue to weigh in on the opportunities and remaining questions of data analytics in healthcare.
As in all applications of datamining, privacy is of acute importance in the discussion on big health data. David Bates, chief of general medicine at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, wrote about the possibility of accessing patients’ phones to gather information about their well-being. The Washington Post’s Health Reform Watch reports regularly on challenges for health data analytics, including the fact that there “don’t appear to be accepted standards yet for how patients agree to have their information used with predictive analytics.”
But another challenge is prior even to privacy concerns. According to a recent GBC report, the major task ahead of big health data analysts is the discovery and deployment of the “right set of tools to allow [agencies] to sift through immense targets of structured and unstructured data.” GBC identifies several examples of public health researchers who have adopted new technologies, often with immediate results. Most significantly, the Congressionally launched Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) developed a methodology to aggregate the medical records of 30 million Americans by September 2015 -- its first major project will be to compare the effectiveness of different treatments for conditions like cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis, and certain cancers.
To learn more about projects in big health data, including genome sequencing, the application of evidence-based medicine (EBM) in government agencies, and the benefits of adopting in-memory database (IMDB) technologies, read GBC’s full report here.
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