Why Big Data Won't Cure Us

The biggest challenge for the use of ''big data'' in health care is social, not technical.Data-intensive approaches to medicine based on predictive modeling hold enormous potential for solving some of the biggest and most intractable problems of health care.The challenge now is figuring out how people, both patients and providers, will actually use data in practice.To understand how data-intensive solutions could have an impact on health care, our research team talked to frontline providers in impoverished and rural areas, technology enthusiasts in mobile health and health IT startups, clinicians and researchers in major research hospitals, Quantified Self members at data-driven meetup presentations of massive amounts of tracking data, and attendees at the growing number of conferences for health technology and innovation up and down both coasts.I found the buzz as feverishly loud around health information innovation as it was during my research on the first dot-com boom.One of our findings from this research seems at first blush so obvious that it is hard to believe it has been overlooked in the design and implementation of health-care innovation technologies.Namely, people imagine data in very different ways.Understanding this key fact about data helps us understand why so-called ''big data'' solutions to health care are so difficult to implement in practice.Doctors, patients, and healthcare entrepreneurs all value data in very different ways.One physician simply said, ''I don't need more data; I need more resources.''*Saying this in Silicon Valley or at TedMed would be tantamount to heresy.Ditto for those of us who work in research and spend our careers collecting, massaging, man-aging, analyzing, and interpreting data.From the doctor's perspective, though, data require (and do not save) extra interpretive, clerical, and managerial labor.This perspective on ''data,'' at least with regard to current clinical practice, is that data use up more resources than the benefits they provide.In other words, most doctors think data innovation means more work for them, not less, and takes away time from what they see as their key priorities in providing quality care.