Better medicine, brought to you by big data through new types of data analysis

 

A good overview of how improved data analysis and presentation is improving health care delivery.

I especially liked the slideshare presentation found below in Related Articles.
The 42 slides in Big data – a brief overview outlines what big data is, its sources and processes, how it is analyzed, current “players”,examples, market analysis, future, and opportunities.

From the 15 July 2012 blog post at Gigaom

Slowly but surely, health care is becoming a killer app for big data. Whether it’s Hadoop, machine learning, natural-language processing or some other technique, folks in the worlds of medicine and hospital administration understand that new types of data analysis are the key to helping them take their fields to the next level.

Here are some of the interesting use cases we’ve written about over the past year or so, and a few others I’ve just come across recently. If you have a cool one — or a suggestion for a new use of big data within the healthcare space — share it in the comments:

Genomics. This is the epitomic case for big data and health care. Genome sequencing isgetting cheaper by the day and produces mountains of data. Companies such asDNAnexus, Bina Technologies, Appistry and NextBio want to make analyzing that data to discover cures for diseases faster, easier and cheaper than ever using lots cutting-edge algorithms and lots of cloud computing cores.

BI[definition of business intelligence] for doctors. Doctors and staff at Seattle Children’s Hospital are using Tableau to analyze and visualize terabytes of data dispersed across the institution’s servers and databases. Not only does visualizing the data help reduce medical errors and help the hospital plan trials but, as of this time last year, its focus on data had saved the hospital $3 million on supply chain costs….

..Semantic search. Imagine you’re a doctor trying to learn about a new patient or figure out who among your patients might benenfit from a new technique. But patient records have been scattered throughout departments, vary in format and, perhaps worst of all, all use the ontologies of the department that created the record. A startup called Apixio is trying to fix this by centralizing records in the cloud and applying semantic analysis to uncover everything doctors need, regardless who wrote it…

..Getting ahead of disease. It’s always good if you figure out how to diagnose diseases early without expensive tests, and that’s just what Seton Healthcare was able to dothanks to its big data efforts…

and more!

Related articles

• Better medicine, brought to you by big data [GigaOM] (gigaom.com)
• Intel and NextBio seek Big Data upgrades in genomics (fiercebiotechit.com)
• Big Changes Are Ahead For The Health Care Industry, Courtesy Of Big Data (fastcompany.com)

• Big data – a brief overview (slideshare.net) [a slide presentation, 42 slides]

• Oracle adopts the popular R language for the enterprise and big data. (oracle.com)
• Presentation: Scalability Challenges in Big Data Science (architects.dzone.com)
• Salesforce intros Radian6 Insights for social big data (zdnet.com)
• Big Data Modeling – Part I – Defining “Big Data” and “Data Modeling” (infocus.emc.com)
• NextBio and Intel Announce Collaboration to Optimize Use of Hadoop Stack And Move Forward With Big Data Technologies in Genomics (ducknetweb.blogspot.com)
• A Beautiful Friendship: Big Data and Social Media (blogs.sap.com)
• Stanford rides Big Data wave in medical research (fiercebiotechit.com)
• Big Data? Big Deal! (clean-clouds.com)

Harnessing The Power Of Open Data

From the 9 June 2011 Medical News Today article

 

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Institute of Medicine (IoM) today co-hosted their second annual event focusing on innovative applications and services that harness the power of open data from HHS and other sources to help improve health and health care.

The Health Data Initiative Forum featured more than 45 new or updated solutions that harness the power of HHS and other federal data to help serve the needs of consumers, health care providers, employers, public health leaders, and policy makers.

“The Health Data Initiative Forum demonstrates our strong commitment to promoting innovative uses of data to advance health and health care in America,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “This initiative is helping consumers take control of their own health and health care by putting the right information at their fingertips, helping doctors and hospitals deliver better and safer care, helping employers promote health and wellness, helping mayors and county commissioners make better-informed decisions that improve the health of communities.”

The forum also featured panel presentations from leaders in information technology development, privacy, venture capital financing, health care delivery systems, state and local government, and public health. Other federal cabinet secretaries participated in the promotion of the use of their agencies’ data, including Environment Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Lisa Jackson, who announced her agency’s new effort to encourage innovators to leverage EPA data to help power useful solutions for the public.

The forum included nearly a dozen announcements of major new initiatives being launched using federally supplied health data. Among these announcements were the public and private sponsorship of new “challenges” to develop data-powered solutions that help improve health, including challenges issued by Walgreen’s Pharmacy, Aetna Foundation, Sanofi-Aventis, and the National Cancer Institute.

Additional key announcements made at the forum included the University of Michigan’s debut of the nation’s first graduate program to focus on consumer health informatics; the launch of Start Up Health, a new seed accelerator/entrepreneur academy in New York City aimed at developing new health and wellness startups; ESRI’s release of a new public community health analytics tool called Community Analyst; and an upcoming “invent-a-thon” focused on developing nursing homes of the future, hosted by Johns Hopkins University and the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance.

Google Public Data Explorer Visualizes Your Data

Google Public Data Explorer Visualizes Your Data

From the official Google Blog item

Over the past two years, we’ve made public data easier to find, explore and understand in several ways, providing unemployment figures, population statistics and world development indicators in search results, and introducing the Public Data Explorer tool. Together with our data provider partners, we’ve curated 27 datasets including more than 300 data metrics. You can now use the Public Data Explorer to visualize everything from labor productivity (OECD) to Internet speed (Ookla) to gender balance in parliaments (UNECE) to government debt levels (IMF) to population density by municipality (Statistics Catalonia), with more data being added every week.***

Today, we’re opening the Public Data Explorer to your data. We’re making a new data format, the Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL), openly available, and providing an interface foranyone to upload their datasets. DSPL is an XML-based format designed from the ground up to support rich, interactive visualizations like those in the Public Data Explorer. The DSPL language and upload interface are available in Google Labs.

To upload a dataset, click on the “My Datasets” link on the left-hand side of the Public Data Explorer. Once imported, a dataset can be visualized, embedded in external websites, shared with others and published. If you’re an official provider, you can request that your datasets appear in the Public Data Explorer directory; please contact us to discuss this process.

With this new capability, we hope more datasets can come to life through Public Data Explorer visualisations and enable people to better understand the world around them and make more informed, data-driven decisions. Stay tuned for more datasets, visualization features and DSPL extensions in the future.

 

***Health related databases of note

• Outbreaks 1996-2009 Dataset

Chan EH, et al. (2010) Global capacity for emerging infectious disease detection. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Catalogue of selected WHO-confirmed outbreaks (as reported in “Disease Outbreak News”), 1996-2009. This tool is meant to provide a visualization of the dataset used in this publication from the HealthMap Project (Children’s Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School, http://www.healthmap.org)

• Sexually Transmitted Diseases in the U.S.

NCHHSTP powered by CDC WONDER

Sexually Transmitted Disease Morbidity Data from U.S. National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention (NCHHSTP), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This dataset was prepared by Google based on data downloaded from CDC WONDER.

• Mortality in the U.S.
  NCHS, OAE powered by CDC WONDER

  Counts and rates of death by underlying cause of death, age, race, sex, and year. Data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) National Vital Statistics System at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), powered by CDC WONDER. This dataset was prepared by Google based on data downloaded from CDC WONDER.

• Cancer cases in the U.S.

CDC, NCI and NAACCR powered by CDC WONDER

Cancer cases by U.S. state, age group, gender and cancer site. Cancer statistics are produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), in collaboration with the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries (NAACCR). This dataset was prepared by Google based on data downloaded from CDC WONDER.

IOM and NAE launch collegiate challenge aimed at solving health problems

IOM and NAE launch collegiate challenge aimed at solving health problems
Through creative technology development

From the February 17, 2011 Eureka News Alert

(National Academy of Sciences) “Go Viral to Improve Health: IOM-NAE Health Data Collegiate Challenge” was launched today by the Institute of Medicine and National Academy of Engineering to promote interaction among future health professionals, engineers, and scientists and to spur interest in harnessing new technologies and data to solve vexing health issues.

WASHINGTON — “Go Viral to Improve Health: IOM-NAE Health Data Collegiate Challenge” was launched today by the Institute of Medicine and National Academy of Engineering to promote interaction among future health professionals, engineers, and scientists and to spur interest in harnessing new technologies and data to solve vexing health issues. The challenge calls on university and college students studying engineering, computer science, and health disciplines to work in interdisciplinary teams to transform health data into new mobile apps, online tools or games, or other innovative products that can improve health at the community level.

The first place team will receive a $3,000 prize and the opportunity to demonstrate their product during the plenary session of the annual Community Health Data Initiative Forum on June 9, 2011. The second and third place teams will receive awards of $2,000 and $1,000 respectively, and both will have the chance to display their winning technologies in the exhibit hall at this national gathering of software engineers, developers, and health leaders. All winning teams will be reimbursed for up to $1,000 of their travel costs to the forum.

Participating teams must develop a web-based or mobile product that tackles a health issue in a creative way and encourages people in a community to interact with one another. The launch of the challenge coincides with the debut of the Health Indicators Warehouse, a vast collection of health data and indicator sets made available by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Teams must tap this online warehouse to create their interactive technologies. Entries will be judged on how well they integrate health data from the warehouse and other information sources as well as their creativity, design, usability, and potential for the product to make an impact on the health issue selected by the team.

Both undergraduate and graduate students may compete. Teams must consist of a minimum of two and up to five individuals and include at least one member pursuing a degree in engineering or computer science and at least one member pursuing a degree toward a career in any of the health professions. The submission deadline is April 27, 2011. A detailed description of “Go Viral to Improve Health: IOM-NAE Health Data Collegiate Challenge” can be found at IOM website and NAE website and on Facebook. Questions can be directed to goviral@nas.edu.

“The IOM-NAE Health Data Collegiate Challenge seeks to tap the creativity and skills of the nation’s brightest young minds because we believe they have the ability to harness health data in novel ways that will make a healthy difference to their communities and to the nation as a whole,” said IOM President Harvey V. Fineberg. “This challenge provides a unique chance to showcase the innovation that can result from interdisciplinary collaboration and also an opportunity for students to gain experience and skills that we hope they will carry into their careers.”

“The trove of health data made available by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services provides a wonderful opportunity for creative young people to design the next ‘viral app’ — one that can improve personal health and extend lives,” said NAE President Charles M. Vest. “‘Advancing Health Informatics‘ was one of 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering identified by the NAE as game-changers in the 21st century, and the interdisciplinary collaboration being encouraged between the fields of engineering and health by this challenge is a key to meeting that goal.”

 

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The Institute of Medicine and National Academy of Engineering along with the National Academy of Sciences and National Research Council make up the National Academies. They are private, nonprofit institutions that provide science, technology, and health policy advice under a congressional charter. For more information, visit http://national-academies.org.