Health Care Thoughts: Welcome to The Matrix
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt from a commentary I am writing……
Health Care Thoughts: Welcome to The Matrix
Big Data, Data Mining, Data Analytics
Health care providers create and store massive amounts of data generated by clinical and business functions. This hot new term for this mass of data is “big data.”
Until recently, the sheer bulk of the data prevented regular analysis, with summaries of key data sets being the most efficient use of executive and IT resources.
Huge leaps forward in data storage, data processing speeds and data analysis algorithms will allow the analysis of massive amounts of data, while health care reform will require the analysis of massive amounts of data.
Where is the interest in health care big data? Government of course, accountable care organizations, integrated networks, large provider units, and private payers.
This marriage of an ability to process data and requirements to process data will create urgency and necessity. The need for deep and broad analysis will create a new era, an era dominated by data mining and data analytics.
The impact on physicians? Ever action and every order will be scrutinized and analyzed, with a relentless search for quality and cost effectiveness, and a relentless search for outliers.
Possible downsides? Immense amounts of resources will be required to process big data, and immense amounts of time will be required to review the results.
And then again, as Wall Street has proven, algorithms sometimes are defective. Who audits the data?
True, true, perhaps, but, hey wait
Won’t most of this data be easy to hide behind a privacy wall? I haven’t been too impressed lately by analysis done on hidden data.
Specific patient data (PHI and EPHI) will not be available.
Different data sets will available to different users – e.g. private insurers, Medicare, states, etc.
Not all data will be available at consumer levels, even if it were we would have no way to cope with data sets of that size, or even some of the summaries.
Will consumers and patients get more data? Absolutely.
Providers and insurers will be under intense pressure to use the data to improve quality and constrain costs, there is where patients will benefit, methinks.
The Heritage Health Prize at kaggle, if you haven’t already seen it.
“Identify patients who will be admitted to a hospital within the next year using historical claims data.”