Dr Lonny Reisman: It's Time to Take Advantage of Big Data in Healthcare

Incorporating big data is essential as it can help explain failures in medical practice, accumulate patient information, and perform a variety of other useful functions, explained Lonny Reisman, MD, CEO of HealthReveal.

Transcript (slightly modified)

With a number of challenges still facing big data, why is now the right time for it?

I think people understand that we need to do a better job with regards to quality and clinical excellence so, to the extent that there are frequent deviations in practice relative to the best standards, we can use big data to understand the basis for those failures. The second, I think, is the somewhat obvious notion that if there are all sorts of information available regarding how patients do vis-à-vis these outcomes relative to certain interventions, in addition to that they have the potential for toxicity for certain products post launch. The ability to aggregate and correlate all that information in ways that will inform practitioners and patients has got to be beneficial. And we’ve seen the use of big data in so many other aspects of our lives—banking, government activities, the fact that we haven’t fully taken advantage of it, or nearly taken advantage of it in healthcare I think is regrettable, but the time is now.