How Data Science Is Transforming Health Care

Chapter 5. Enabling Data

Data science is not optional in health care reform; it is the linchpin of the whole process. All of the examples we’ve seen, ranging from cancer treatment to detecting hot spots where additional intervention will make hospital admission unnecessary, depend on using data effectively: taking advantage of new data sources and new analytics techniques, in addition to the data the medical profession has had all along.

But it’s too simple just to say “we need data.” We’ve had data all along: handwritten records in manila folders on acres and acres of shelving. Insurance company records. But it’s all been locked up in silos: insurance silos, hospital silos, and many, many doctor’s office silos. Data doesn’t help if it can’t be moved, if data sources can’t be combined.

There are two big issues here. First, a surprising number of medical records are still either hand-written, or in digital formats that are scarcely better than hand-written (for example, scanned images of hand-written records). Getting medical records into a format that’s computable is a prerequisite for almost any kind of progress. Second, we need to break down those silos.

Anyone who has worked with data knows that, in any problem, 90% of the work is getting the data in a form in which it can be used; the analysis itself is often simple. We need electronic health records: patient data in a more-or-less standard form that can be shared efficiently, data that can be moved from one location to another ...