As big data gets bigger, we need more medical research

Big data has been showing up a lot in healthcare headlines this year, whether announcing a new application for machine intelligence or a healthcare provider enrolling thousands of patients in a precision medicine initiative. But what impact is all this data having on medical research and patient care?

The answer, according to a recent article from NPR, is ‘not as much as you'd think’. While the number of health data repositories is growing exponentially, scientists’ ability to make sense of all this information isn’t keeping up.

At one level this makes sense - 'big' data is by definition a volume or variety of data that overwhelms an institution. However, some institutions (like Facebook) are finding ways to make big data meaningful, while medical researchers on the whole are still overwhelmed by it.

This lag in medical research using big data is especially unfortunate considering the billions of dollars spent to develop data repositories. The nation-wide shift to electronic health records is the most obvious example - a transition that has cost the federal government more than $28 billion in incentives to hospital and doctors. As electronic health records approach universal adoption, this vast data repository could provide new insights about health and disease.

The federal government has also invested in big data through the White House's Cancer Moonshot and the National Institute of Health's Precision Medicine Initiative and BRAIN Initiative. Whether focused on cancer, brain research, or a variety of disease indicators, these megaprojects are compiling health data at an unprecedented scale.

The problem is that medical researchers have done almost nothing to systematically analyze the information in these extensive repositories - whether specific disease datasets or electronic health records more broadly.

At a recent gathering of patient advocates, NPR spoke to Dr. Atul Butte, who leads the Institute for Computational Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. As Butte told reporters, "As a country, I think we're investing close to zero analyzing any of that data."

This doesn't mean there hasn't been progress in the private sector. Tech giants like Google and IBM have been investing in healthcare for a while, with ongoing projects to speed cancer research or more accurately diagnose diabetic retinopathy. But the overall trend is that big data remains big - meaning it's still overwhelming medical researchers' ability to analyze it.