Archive for July, 2012
Everyone is Talking about Big Data
July 20, 2012
Several new publications about Big Data in healthcare are showing up with good analysis of this emerging field.
First, an article from PharmExec called “Super-Size Me: Optimizing the Information Explosion” which came out in May. They note new sources of information including:
- Electronic Medical Records
- Social Media
- Real world evidence
- Personalized medicine
- Track and trace systems
They see significant potential value in big data:
» Uncover unmet needs
» Assess the feasibility of clinical trial designs and recruit trial subjects
» Demonstrate product value
» Conduct pharmacovigilance
» React more quickly to market changes via real-time market measurement and sophisticated KPIs
» Enhance commercial activities and enable more personalized messaging
» Deploy predictive capabilities rather than retrospective analytics
And next they note the layers of technology required:
- Collection, Aggregation, and Storage
- Analytics
- Reporting.
- “Nowcasting,” real-time data analysis, and pattern recognition will surely get better.
- The good of Big Data will outweigh the bad. User innovation could lead the way, with “do-it-yourself analytics.”
- Open access to tools and data “transparency” are necessary for people to provide information checks and balances. A re they enough?
- The Internet of Things will diffuse intelligence, but lots of technical hurdles must be overcome.
- Humans, rather than machines, will still be the most capable of extracting insight and making judgments using Big Data. Statistics can still lie.
- Respondents are concerned about the motives of governments and corporations, the entities that have the most data and the incentive to analyze it. Manipulation and surveillance are at the heart of their Big Data agendas.
Virtual Presentation in Bilbao, Spain at Salud 2.0
July 9, 2012
Salud 2.0 is simply Health 2.0 in Spanish. This conference brings together speakers to discuss Web 2.0 technologies in health care. My presentation was Social Media in Health Care: A Reasoned Approach.
I received several questions and will repeat them here to give more complete answers:
- What to you mean about the risk of conflict of interest?
Because social media is largely brief communication, a physician or other healthcare professional could promote a product or service without a disclaimer that they have a financial interest in this product. To be transparent about potential conflicts of interest in social media, one must add a link to a webpage with full disclosure. Drug and device companies must be clear about any claims they make on social media and should link to more complete information. - There are so many social media outlets, how do you choose where to start?
Find the best tool for what you need. It is not necessary to use multiple social media tools. For instance, if you are a physician or healthcare professional and want to communicate with colleagues, use Twitter if you are comfortable with more open communications, use a private social network for your group only if you would rather keep private. If you are a hospital and want to interact with patients, consider Facebook because it is an open, widely used platform which allows comments from patients. - In Spain there is a publicly supported healthcare system, unlike the US. How should the approach to social media be different?
I would think hospitals would still want to hear from patients but would not use social media as a means to attract new patients unless there was a specialty service that more patients should be made aware of. A good example of this is http://www.guiametabolica.org/ which is also being presented at the conference. Social media could also have more of a public health approach – how to keep the population healthier and identify diseases earlier for intervention.
Here are the slides from the presentation. And the video is below:
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