Healthcare Companies Partner for Big Data Applications

The healthcare industry is undergoing a revolution of sorts, which revolves around the acquisition and use of Big Data. These are the latest findings of Kalorama Information (New York, NY, USA), an independent medical market research firm.

The utilization of Big Data concepts comes at a favorable time for the healthcare industry, as executives are seeking to improve outcomes and control costs. It is estimated that in the US healthcare sector, if used productively, Big Data could create more than USD 300 billion in value each year. A key driver toward the use of Big Data is cost savings via insights garnered from the management of these vast datasets, as well as the patient benefits to be derived from the use of evidence-based medicine on a large scale.

Over 130 key partnerships, acquisitions, alliances, and organizations in healthcare have been formed over the last two years in an attempt to meet the challenges of the enormous datasets that flow daily from healthcare providers, manufacturers, regulatory bodies, scientists and others. An example is for Flatiron Health (New York, NY, USA), which aggregates cancer-patient data from a wide variety of sources to help doctors make treatment decisions. The company received USD 130 million in financing in May 2014, the bulk of it from Google Ventures (Mountain View, CA, USA).

Another example is the agreement between Forest Laboratories (New York, NY, USA), ConvergeHealth (Newton, MA, USA), and Intermountain Healthcare (Salt Lake City, UT, USA) in April 2014, which involves a multi-year collaboration to conduct outcomes research leveraging a next generation platform designed to improve the treatment of respiratory diseases.

Big data is an all-encompassing term for any collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using traditional data processing applications. Challenges include analysis, capture, searching, sharing, storage, transfer, visualization, and privacy violations. The trend to larger data sets is due to the additional information derivable from analysis of a single large set of related data, as compared to separate smaller sets with the same total amount of data, allowing correlations to be found. The definition of Big Data is also constantly changing, ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data.

Related Links:
Kalorama Information
Flatiron Health
Google Ventures