Comments on: Better medicine, brought to you by big data

By: speyersroadnews

speyersroadnews — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 13:04:45 +0000

At the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, we are currently finalizing analysis on the Global Burden of Disease. We are estimating the burden from morbidity and premature mortality for 240 causes in 187 countries by age and sex, along with 60+ related risk factors. We are using tens of thousands of data sets and data points from censuses, surveys, vital statistics, hospital records, disease registries, literature reviews, and many other sources. Not big data in terms of terabytes, but certainly big data in terms of number of data sources with different taxonomies and ontologies, and issues around quality and documentation.

By: Nate

Nate — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 05:55:07 +0000

So where does a young grad student go to get involved in making sense of all this data that will be pouring in as more and more folks adopt EHR systems? I’m excited about companies such as Apixio and Allscripts. It seems it’ll be quite a bit of work to structure this data and apply it in a meaningful way. Perhaps you can infiltrate one of the teams that is doing this and offer up some further insight?

By: Jake Marcus

Jake Marcus — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 03:16:28 +0000

The adoption of electronic health records is starting to reach a critical mass that will enable the type of analysis you describe. I’m a data scientist at Practice Fusion, a free web-based electronic health record company that covers over 150,000 healthcare professionals and 40 million patients. In effect what you’re describing in the last few sentences is a form of syndromic surveillance. We’ve started to do some work on this at research.practicefusion.com and there’s also great work being done on this by the Primary Care Information Project in New York. Huge potential to eventually replace ad-hoc case reporting for outbreak detection with real-time reports aggregated from EHR data.

By: Jo Prichard

Jo Prichard — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 20:09:23 +0000

Hi Derrick

At LexisNexis Risk Solutions we are actively engaged in using the open source HPCCSystems data intensive compute platform along with the massive LexisNexis Public Data Social Graph to tackle everything from fraud waste and abuse, drug seeking behavior, provider collusion to disease management and community healthcare interventions.

We have invested in analytics that help map the social context (not social media) of events through trusted relationships to create better understanding of the big picture that surrounds each healthcare event, patient, provider, business, assets and more.

If you have time to touch base for a more detailed overview, please feel free to give me a shout!

By: Alineh Haidery

Alineh Haidery — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 19:43:00 +0000

How about making sense of large amounts of data to understand the root causes of patient flow barriers causing delays in healthcare and inhibiting patient safety?

By: Derrick Harris

Derrick Harris — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 02:22:26 +0000

I love that idea, actually. I would imagine you could actually get a lot of local support from small town residents on that.

By: justin

justin — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 19:40:36 +0000

Actian’s vectorwise is helping many companies, they just started a relationship with companies that provide database management support for hospitals. http://www.actian.com/newsroom/press/medical-data-vision

By: Dave Mackey

Dave Mackey — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 19:34:33 +0000

I’d like to see meta-analysis of nationwide (worldwide?) data. I’ll give permission to my medical records, then correlate my health with that of others who grew up in the same locale, ate the same foods, underwent the same vaccinations, worked the same jobs, and so on and look for common patterns in disease. I think this could turn up interesting stuff. Folks spread across the US suffering from diverse symptoms might discover they were supposed to x substance in x location at x time…and this would only become apparent when the entire third grade class from x shows up with similar symptoms – even though spread across the nation.

By: Derrick Harris

Derrick Harris — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 17:17:39 +0000

Does RateADrug do any analysis of the database? User reviews are great, but they’re better when combined with correlations between drugs, effects, demographics, etc. That’s where I think the real value of consumer data lies.

By: Sam Katz

Sam Katz — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 16:16:04 +0000

Suprised there was no reference to Rateadrug or other user public data base systems.