Big data can improve health but first we need to build the foundations

[AussieNeil]

"There have never been more ways to monitor our personal health and well-being, and share and compare our findings. We can track our activity, diet, exercise, emotions and sleeping habits on our mobiles, Fitbits, Apple watches and apps. We can even have our genomes sequenced.

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But the availability of data is just the starting point – we then need to make sense of the data."

theconversation.com/big-dat...

Julian Elliott, Head of Clinical Research in the Department of Infectious Diseases, Alfred Hospital and Monash University and Senior Research Fellow at the Australasian Cochrane Centre, Cochrane looks at how the current research process works (a good read in itself, in particular the description of how pharmaceutical companies bring a new drug to market and what happens next) and then examines the challenges involved in integrating the rapidly growing amount of health data to provide health benefits.

Then as ZDNet points out, before we start start collecting and collating all that data, we need to have the security/privacy foundations in place!:

zdnet.com/article/e-health-...

Neil