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?