Big Data in Healthcare: Anil Jain, MD, Is A Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at IBM Watson Health

Big Data in Healthcare
Population health management and value-based care are the ultimate aims of the
healthcare industry, big data is becoming, and it will be the critical factor in patient care
improvements.
First of all, let’s define big data, according to Cambridge dictionary it is a very large sets of
data that are produced by people using the internet, and that can only be stored,
understood, and used with the help of specialized tools and methods. Big Data is a big thing,
and it will change our world completely. The phenomenon of big data is often described
using five Vs: Volume, Velocity, Variety, Veracity, and Value (will be discussed later in this
article).
Recently, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital platform has launched a new data-sharing,
and collaboration platform in the cloud that it contends is the world’s largest public
repository of pediatric cancer genomics data. Called St. Jude Cloud, the online resource--
which includes analysis tools and visualizations—is available to the global research
community to help advance medical breakthroughs in childhood cancer. The platform
provides researchers with access to more than 5,000 whole genomes, 5,000 whole exome
and 1,200 RNA-Sequence datasets from more than 5,000 pediatric cancer patients and
survivors.
This is a one example of how big data can contribute to curing diseases, other ways
healthcare can benefit from big data use and implementation could be preventing medical
errors, identifying high-risk patients, reducing hospital costs and wait times, preventing
security breaches and fraud, enhancing patient engagement and outcomes, avoiding
preventable death, predicting epidemics and of course improving the quality of life.
Big data is not just about lots of data; it is a concept providing an opportunity to find new
insight into your existing data as well guidelines to capture and analyze your future data. It
makes any business more agile and robust so it can adapt and overcome business
challenges. I will try to break out the 5Vs of big data in simple language quoting from Mr.
Anil Jain, MD, is a Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at IBM Watson Health:
Volume: Big data first and foremost has to be “big,” and size, in this case, is measured as
volume. From clinical data associated with lab tests and physician visits to the
administrative data surrounding payments and payers, this well of information is already
expanding. When that data is coupled with greater use of precision medicine, there will be a
big data explosion in health care, especially as genomic and environmental data become
more ubiquitous.
Velocity: Velocity in the context of big data refers to two related concepts familiar to
anyone in healthcare: the rapidly increasing speed at which new data is being created by
technological advances, and the corresponding need for that data to be digested and
analyzed in near real-time. For example, as more and more medical devices are designed to
monitor patients and collect data, there is great demand to be able to analyze that data and
then to transmit it back to clinicians and others. This “internet of things” of healthcare will
only lead to increasing velocity of big data in healthcare.
Variety: With increasing, volume and velocity comes increasing variety. This third “V”
describes just what you’d think: the vast diversity of data types that healthcare
organizations see every day. Again, think about electronic health records and those medical
devices: Each one might collect a different kind of data, which in turn might be interpreted
differently by different physicians—or made available to a specialist but not a primary care
provider. The challenge for healthcare systems when it comes to data variety? Standardizing
and distributing all of that information so that everyone involved is on the same page. With
the increasing adoption of population health and big data analytics, we are seeing a greater
variety of data by combining traditional clinical and administrative data with unstructured
notes, socioeconomic data, and even social media data.
Variability: The way care is provided to any given patient depends on all kinds of factors—
and the way the care is delivered and more importantly the way the data is captured may
vary from time to time or place to place. For example, what a clinician reads in the medical
literature, where they trained, or the professional opinion of a colleague down the hall, or
how a patient expresses herself during her initial exam all may play a role in what happens
next. Such variability means data can only be meaningfully interpreted when care setting
and delivery process is taken into context. For example, a diagnosis of “CP” may mean chest
pain when entered by a cardiologist or primary care physician but may mean “cerebral
palsy” when entered by a neurologist or pediatrician. Because true interoperability is still
somewhat elusive in health care data, variability remains a constant challenge.
Value: Last but not least, big data must have value. That is, if you’re going to invest in the
infrastructure required to collect and interpret data on a system-wide scale, it’s essential to
ensure that the insights that are generated are based on accurate data and lead to
measurable improvements at the end of the day.
A question to ask, where it stands today and where it’s going? Other questions come up,
when will big data be needed, ……
References:
1. https://www.ibm.com/blogs/watson-health/the-5-vs-of-big-data/
2. https://blog.sqlauthority.com/2013/10/02/big-data-what-is-big-data-3-vs-of-big-d...
3. https://www.healthdatamanagement.com/news/st-jude-launches-largest-public-reposi...
4. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/big-data
5. https://www.fdic.gov/regulations/examinations/supervisory/insights/sisum06/sisum...

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