The Private Practice eZine Spring 2013 Page 56

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TECHNOlOGY

most important, it can expand access to
healthcare, align pay with performance and
help hold down growth in healthcare costs."

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

To add to the challenges faced by today's
healthcare industry, there's now additional
pressure from patients who have increased
service demands. Patients want more
tailored medical solutions. The solution
to this is to use Big Data to provide more
tailored medical solutions.

Personalised medical treatment is central

to any discussion on the integration of Big
Data in the healthcare industry. A report
based on the Intel Healthcare Innovation
Summit 2012 reinforced the capacity of
Big Data to deliver personalised medical
solutions for patients.

MartinLeach,ChiefInformationOfficer

for the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard,
points to the need for a "Google-like search
capability that allows natural-language
searches, straight-text searches, image based
searches, and structural searches". Leach
envisages finding the data he needs from
various sources, combining the data through
a common data exchange.

An important issue discussed at the

Intel Healthcare Summit 2012 was the
impact of Big Data on early drug discovery
stage. According to Mike Miller, Senior
Director of Pfizer Global Pharmaceuticals,
"Merging disparate bits of data will help
speed the process and development of
personalised medicine."

John Halamka, Dean of Technology at

Harvard Medical School, has suggested the
eventual product of Big Data will be event-
driven medicine when the data combines
to signal a potentially emergent situation,
clinicians are alerted and the data drives an
actionable event that keeps the patient well.

PREVENTION PLANS

While the integration of Big Data in the
healthcare industry is still at a very early stage,
there are already examples of companies that
have successfully used Big Data technology to
develop healthcare applications.

One such example identified in the

aforementionedMcKinsey&Companyreport
is a GPS-enabled tracker developed by
Asthmapolis that monitors inhaler usage by
asthmatics. The information gathered from
the app is sent to a central database and used
to identify individual, group and population-
based trends. This information is then
combined with existing information about
known asthma catalysts to help physicians
develop personalised treatment plans and
spot prevention opportunities.

Another example is a mobile application

developed by Ginger.io, in which participating
patients are tracked through their mobile
phones and assisted with behavioural
health therapies.

By monitoring the mobile sensors

present in smartphones, the application
records calling information, texting
information, location and even movement
information. The application then integrates
this information with public research of
behavioural health data, which may give
specialists a more accurate understanding
of what triggers anxiety, enabling them to
tailor treatments.

FUTURE FOCUS

From a market perspective, it is critical
that healthcare executives and industry
stakeholders acknowledge the role Big Data
can play in ensuring healthcare businesses
remain competitive. Market dynamics and
competitive pressures require enhanced
understanding of underlying Big Data trends.