Transforming Healthcare through Big Data – SIIM 2014 Opening General Session
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JoAnn Linder, Director Global Marketing Communications, Carestream
Katherine Andriole PhD, FSIIM, opened SIIM 2014 with the ‘wave of big data’ sharing a history of inventions showcasing amazing technological advancements over a very short period of time. Historically, big data was managed in the format of ‘big iron,’ which consisted of computing power, storage, no internet, and available access for few.
We’ve now embarked on the next phase of big data–the promise of predictive healthcare. The future of big data management will take all available multi-disciplinary, multi-modality information from disparate sources and use integration, analysis and visualization to let the data tell the story.
There are multiple models for depicting big data’s impact, one of them being the 3V Model, which encompasses velocity, volume and variety. All three of these vectors are represented in our healthcare system data:
- Velocity: Processing speed
- Volume: Data quantity
- Variety: Types of data such as genetic, demographic, clinical, and social
Not one of these V’s is a massive challenge, but the combination of all three makes the situation a promise for our future that requires collaboration for success. Andriole emphasized access to the data as the biggest challenge in addition to storage, access to biomedical information, security, privacy, and visualization.
Referencing Samuel J. Dwyer, Andriole asked the audience to get on the big data wave by doing the following:
- Work across disciplines- engineering, informatics, physics and biomedicine
- Understand the application environment
- Engage with industry partners
- Collaborate to solve problems
How has big data affected your organization? Is your organization using big data to drive change in how care is being provided to patients?
