July 2014 | Using Big Data To Transform Care

Medicare’s release of practitioner payments highlights the strengths and weaknesses of digging into big data.

Big data has the potential to create significant value in health care by improving outcomes while lowering costs. Big data’s defining features include the ability to handle massive data volume and variety at high velocity. New, flexible, and easily ...

The US health care system is rapidly adopting electronic health records, which will dramatically increase the quantity of clinical data that are available electronically. Simultaneously, rapid progress has been made in clinical analytics—...

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), an academic health care institution affiliated with Harvard University, has been an early adopter of electronic applications since the 1970s. Various departments of the medical center and the physician ...

Predictive analytics, or the use of electronic algorithms to forecast future events in real time, makes it possible to harness the power of big data to improve the health of patients and lower the cost of health care. However, this opportunity raises ...

The use of predictive modeling for real-time clinical decision making is increasingly recognized as a way to achieve the Triple Aim of improving outcomes, enhancing patients’ experiences, and reducing health care costs. The development and validation of ...

A “rapid-learning health system” was proposed in a 2007 thematic issue of Health Affairs . The system was envisioned as one that uses evidence-based medicine to quickly determine the best possible treatments for patients. It ...

Big data in medicine—massive quantities of health care data accumulating from patients and populations and the advanced analytics that can give those data meaning—hold the prospect of becoming an engine for the knowledge generation that is necessary to ...

Except for a few conditions, pediatric disorders are rare diseases. Because of this, no single institution has enough patients to generate adequate sample sizes to produce generalizable knowledge. Aggregating electronic clinical data from millions of ...

Information in electronic health data that are drawn from large populations of patients is transforming health care, public health practice, and clinical research. This article describes our experience in developing data networks that repurpose electronic ...

Unprecedented change in the US health care system is being driven by the rapid uptake of health information technology and national investments in multi-institution research networks comprising academic centers, health care delivery systems, and other ...

As the largest single payer for health care in the United States, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) generates enormous amounts of data. Historically, CMS has faced technological challenges in storing, analyzing, and disseminating this ...

Health care has lagged behind other industries in its use of advanced analytics. The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) has three decades of experience collecting data about the veterans it serves nationwide through locally developed information systems ...

The era of big data, loosely defined as the development and analysis of large or complex data sets, brings new opportunities to empower patients and their families to generate, collect, and use their health information for both clinical and research ...

The goal of comparative effectiveness research is to assess medical therapies and allow patients, health care providers, payers, and policy makers to make evidence-based decisions about the most appropriate therapies in routine clinical practice. To ...

Randomized controlled trials have traditionally been the gold standard against which all other sources of clinical evidence are measured. However, the cost of conducting these trials can be prohibitive. In addition, evidence from the trials frequently ...

High bed occupancy rates have been considered a matter of reduced patient comfort and privacy and an indicator of high productivity for hospitals. Hospitals with bed occupancy rates of above 85 percent are generally considered to have bed shortages. ...

Researchers explore what is possible with billions of data points and powerful computers.

New genomic sequencing technologies enable the high-speed analysis of multiple genes simultaneously, including all of those in a person’s genome. Sequencing is a prominent example of a “big data” technology because of the massive amount of information it ...

Federally qualified health centers play an important role in providing health care to underserved populations. Recent substantial federal investments in health information technology have enabled health centers to expand their use of electronic health ...

Despite major national investments to support the adoption of health information technology (IT), concerns persist that barriers are inhibiting that adoption and the use of advanced health IT capabilities in rural areas in particular. Using a survey of ...

The recent uptick in hospital adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) has been accompanied by growing concerns among some policy makers that hospitals may use these systems to select billing codes that reflect more intensive care or a sicker patient ...

As the United States moves forward with health reform, the communication gap between researchers and policy makers will need to be narrowed to promote policies informed by evidence. Social media represent an expanding channel for communication. Academic ...

The next open enrollment period for plans offered in the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA’s) insurance Marketplaces is set to occur between November 15, 2014, and February 15, 2015—just when many lower-income people are financially stressed by demands of the ...

A woman living with chronic pain tries to manage her condition while maneuvering through the maze of opioid medications.