Big Data Is Coming, But When Will It Be Really Useful?

One of the many promises of EHRs is that, in fairly short order, they’re going to make an ever-growing amount of data available in the quest for better population health management. But how realistic is that promise?

As this academic sees it, “there is sometimes unbridled enthusiasm that the data captured in clinical systems, perhaps combined with research data such as gene sequencing, will effortlessly provide us knowledge of what works in healthcare and how new treatments can be developed. . . . I honestly share in this enthusiasm, but I also realize that it needs to be tempered, or at least given a dose of reality. In particular, we must remember that our great data analytics and algorithms will only get us so far. If we have poor underlying data, the analyses may end up misleading us. We must be careful for problems of data incompleteness and incorrectness.”