FEATURE
What’s the Big Deal with Big Data?
Clinical trials, the largest of which may enroll a few
thousand patients with hematology or oncology
diagnoses, represent the gold standard of clinical research. But what if clinical decisions could be made,
or research questions answered, using data from tens
of thousands or even a million patients?
Initiatives are springing up across the country
to examine the power and promise of big data –
massive amounts of information that can be analyzed to provide an overview of trends or patterns
– to revolutionize health care and transform how
patients are diagnosed, treated, and even involved
in their own care.
For instance, in 2012, the National Institutes of
Health (NIH) established the Big Data to Knowledge
(BD2K) initiative, an effort to promote research and
development of tools and approaches that would accelerate the use of big data in biomedical research.1
This spring, IBM launched IBM Watson Health and
the Watson Health Cloud platform, a new unit of
the IBM Watson cognitive computing system that
will analyze and extract large volumes of health data
from structured and unstructured medical systems.2
While the promise of big data is immense, the
movement is not without technical, legislative, and
privacy concerns. We spoke with several experts
who seemed to agree that, before big data becomes
a regular part of clinical practice, questions about
these concerns need to be answered.
What Exactly is Big Data?
The term “big data” is popping up more often in
ASHClinicalNews.org
discussions of the future of health care, but what
does it really mean?
At its core, big data refers to data collected from
multiple internal and external sources that are too
large and complex for traditional analytics to handle.
In recent years, there have been a number of technological innovations to store, proce