What's the Big Deal with Big Data? - ASH Clinical News

Clinical trials, the largest of which may enroll a few thousand patients with hematology or oncology diagnoses, represent the gold standard of clinical research. But what if clinical decisions could be made, or research questions answered, using data from tens of thousands or even a million patients? Initiatives are springing up across the country to examine the power and promise of big data – massive amounts of information that can be analyzed to provide an overview of trends or patterns – to revolutionize health care and transform how patients are diagnosed, treated, and even involved in their own care. For instance, in 2012, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) established the Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative, an effort to promote research and development of tools and approaches that would accelerate the use of big data in biomedical research.1 This spring, IBM launched IBM Watson Health and the Watson Health Cloud platform, a new unit of the IBM Watson cognitive computing system that will analyze and extract large volumes of health data from structured and unstructured medical systems.2