B.C. health care on the cutting edge of Big Data
Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/health+care+cutting+edge+Data/6575625/story.html#ixzz1uBYdApSg
Big Data can discover things it would take years for human researchers on their own to discover, if they ever could.Big Data can reveal the overlooked negative effects of a drug or, conversely, unexpected benefits and new treatments. It can lead us to insights into how a drug has worked over a vast population, enabling researchers to determine which doses are most effective, which are wrong-headed or perhaps dangerous.
Tracking Big Data can help you find out if a medical procedure really gets the results we think and desire. Or it might reveal diagnostic and treatment mistakes we are making and suggest overlooked ways of improving health care. Plug in genetics, a factor that often influences how medicines and treatments work on an individual basis, and you are looking at the possibility of bespoke, genomic medicine — health care tailored to an individual, in much the same way as a tailor customizes a suit or dress.
Big Data can and will save lives. And it will almost certainly save money.
The McKinsey Global Institute has estimated that Big Data could lead to $300 billion of savings in the U.S. health care system. John Wilbanks, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, says in his latest report that “combining larger data sets on drug response with genomic data on patients could steer therapies to the people they are most likely to help. This could substantially reduce the need for trial-and-error medicine, with all its discomforts, high costs and sometimes tragically wrong guesses.”
Yet almost every B.C. researcher you talk to will lament British Columbia is not using its public health data resource to the degree it should be. The question is why not?
Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/health+care+cutting+edge+Data/6575625/story.html#ixzz1uBYSg2yO
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