Big data mashups hold research potential, practical challenges for healthcare industry

Big data mashups hold research potential, practical challenges for healthcare industry 150 150 Biomedical & Health Informatics (BHI)

Other industries have been far more successful than healthcare in mashing together big datasets to learn more about their customers. The prospect raises myriad possibilities, according to a Viewpoint article in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

What could be learned by combining patients’ shopping patterns, credit-card data, distance from healthcare facilities, healthcare use patterns and other information?

Medical researchers, the authors say, first must identify the sources of information that could provide value to their work and determine how it could provide insight, write the authors, affiliated with Boston’s Harvard Medical School, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Boston Children’s Hospital.

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