Updated 1-6-15: The piece also aired this week on NPR's All Things Considered.
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9-29-14: Back in 2011, rheumatologist Jennifer Frankovich, MD, and colleagues at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford used aggregate patient data from electronic medical records in making a difficult and quick decision in the care of a 13-year-old girl with a rare disease.
Today on San Francisco's KQED, Frankovich discusses the unusual case and the potential of big data to transform the practice of medicine. Stanford systems-medicine chief Atul Butte, MD, PhD, also weighed in on the topic in the segment by saying, "The idea here is [that] the scientific method itself is growing obsolete." More from the piece:
Big data is more than medical records and environmental data, Butte says. It could (or already does) include the results of every clinical trial that’s ever been done, every lab test, Google search, tweet. The data from your fitBit.
Eventually, the challenge won’t be finding the data, it’ll be figuring out how to organize it all. “I think the computational side of this is, let’s try to connect everything to everything,” Butte says.
Frankovich agrees with Butte, noting that developing systems to accurately interpret genetic, medical or other health metrics is key if such practices are going to become the standard model of care.
Previously: How efforts to mine electronic health records influence clinical care, NIH Director: “Big Data should inspire us”, Chief technology officer of the United States to speak at Big Data in Biomedicine conference and A new view of patient data: Using electronic medical records to guide treatment
