Leveraging Data Analytics to Advance Personal, Population, and System Health

Michael E. Thompson, Michael F. Dulin
2019 North Carolina Medical Journal  
The health care industry collects ever-increasing volumes of patient data. Currently, this largely untapped "big data" primarily documents encounters and facilitates billing. This issue of the North Carolina Medical Journal explores the promise and the perils of big data as we seek to transform our health care system into one that is more proactive, equitable, and value based. T o make big data useful while protecting patient privacy, we need new governance models that allow organizations to
more » ... at data as a fundamental asset. Next, we need to ensure data quality and integrity, and then the timely and seamless integration of clinical data with data describing social determinants and health behaviors. This more holistic patient and community view will reveal key health outcomes drivers and guide focused, evidence-based interventions. As we share data across health systems, we will prevent duplication of services and ensure better coordination of care. Connecting with individuals through social media will speed dissemination of evidence-based information and help overcome limitations in health literacy while also allowing patients to share data with their providers. We need to learn from other industries and to support innovation through entrepreneurship. While big data can help us overcome health disparities, we must implement these new approaches keenly aware of their potential to disenfranchise those with limited digital access and those whose data are not part of the analyses. Done right, these approaches and insights will help ensure that big data fulfills its promise of helping us achieve our ultimate goal of health for all, individually and collectively. The Need to Produce Information The health and health care delivery system is awash in data, yet barely ankle deep in information. Health care data in the United States is projected to exceed 2,314 exabytes (a trillion megabytes) by 2020 [1] and is growing at 80 megabytes per patient per year [2] . Those values equate to approximately 665 million megabytes (665 terabytes) of data for the average hospital [3], with an annual growth rate of 36%-48% [1, 4] . In addition to the data generated from clinical encounters, we have untold amounts of data generated from health-related social media messages and the burgeoning area of patient (consumer) generated data from devices like Fitbit activity trackers. Globally, the social media platform Twitter alone generates approximately 280,000 health-related tweets per day [5, 6] and a third of Facebook users post about health experiences [7] , while Fitbits, one of many consumer health wearables linked to only one of over 165,000 health and fitness mobile apps that generate health data [7], have already captured over 150 billion hours of heart data [8] . So, we have big data in health care (maybe not in the form we thought we would have), but we are still sadly lacking in intelligence in the form of insight or actionable information. In this issue brief, we explore many of the facets of the promise, perils, trends, and trajectories of health informatics and analytics, preparing the reader for the many thoughtful and revealing papers that comprise this issue of the North Carolina Medical Journal. While these issues play out on the national stage, we see-and acutely feel-them here in North Carolina. We conclude with our thoughts on principles and strategies to help us avoid analysis paralysis and move closer to achieving our ultimate goal of health for all, individually and collectively. Health and health care lag far behind other economic sectors in unlocking value from big data and advancing insights and practices [9] . This laggardly pace-and the general acceptance of this status quo as intransigent-is even more alarming when one remembers that health care accounts for 18% of US gross domestic product, and is projected to surpass 19% by 2027 [10] . As Premier, Inc.'s Leigh Anderson notes, hardly a better case can be made for the near unlimited potential to improve health outcomes, increase efficiency in deploying our finite resources, and advance our knowledge and insights that in turn will further
doi:10.18043/ncm.80.4.214 fatcat:lvnif7iccvgu3iftnxnm54ecby