The data-driven revolution of health care

Abstract

The Web has caused an exponential increase of available data. This has lead to a new world of applications that take on the challenge of analyzing and exploiting all this data. Data science is a new term to describe the applied blend of mathematics, statistics, computation, and hacking necessary to build data-driven solutions. More and more often, this involves working on Big Data. Breakthroughs are being made in fields in which large amounts of data are handled, leading to increased efficiency and quality of results and, above all, to an array of previously unconceived applications. In this chapter, we will give some insights into the ways in which health care is being transformed by data analysis. First, we will talk about improving data acquisition, crucial to unlocking the potential of new applications. Then, we will move on to clinical decision support systems applied to adverse drug reactions. Last but not least, we will discuss how to leverage Big Data to improve health care. The bigger picture is of data analysis fundamentally changing how we approach many healthcare problems. A data-driven future of health care is ahead.