What's so different about big data?. A primer for clinicians trained to think epidemiologically

Abstract

The Big Data movement in computer science has brought dramatic changes in what counts as data, how those data are analyzed, and what can be done with those data. Although increasingly pervasive in the business world, it has only recently begun to influence clinical research and practice. As Big Data draws from different intellectual traditions than clinical epidemiology, the ideas may be less familiar to practicing clinicians. There is an increasing role of Big Data in health care, and it has tremendous potential. This Demystifying Data Seminar identifies four main strands in Big Data relevant to health care. The first is the inclusion of many new kinds of data elements into clinical research and operations, in a volume not previously routinely used. Second, Big Data asks different kinds of questions of data and emphasizes the usefulness of analyses that are explicitly associational but not causal. Third, Big Data brings new analytic approaches to bear on these questions. And fourth, Big Data embodies a new set of aspirations for a breaking down of distinctions between research data and operational data and their merging into a continuously learning health system.

Keywords: automatic data processing; data collection; data mining; information systems; multilevel analyses.

Figure 1.

Some sources of Big Data.