With 'Obamacare' Kicking In, Microsoft Sees a Health-Data Windfall 201
curtwoodward writes "Now that President Obama's federal health care reform is past its major political hurdles — and with renewed focus on out-of-control costs in healthcare — companies that sell 'big data' software are licking their chops. The reason: Healthcare has huge piles of information that is being used in new ways, to track patient admissions, spending, and much more. From hospitals to insurance companies, they'll all need new ways of crunching those numbers. It's basically an entirely new field that will dwarf the spending growth in traditional data-heavy industries like finance, retail and marketing, a Microsoft regional sales GM says."
Uses of 'big data' (Score:5, Informative)
i work at a major medical research institution. A few years ago, our CIO showed us a graph of data they'd gone through showing a large spike in heart attacks in otherwise healthy men. The spike then dropped a few years later. Normally someone wouldn't be looking at this data, so it wasn't until after the spike was gone that this was investigated. Turned out that Vioxx had been put on the market about a year before the spike started, and was pulled off the market about 6 months or so before the spike dropped off.
Getting massive amounts of data (anonymized of course) can show trends in public health that can give us a lot of information and save lives and money.
(and yes, I hate the term 'big data'. No sense of scale of how big it is.)