Systems struggle to deal with information deluge

Data are flooding into the world's health services at a rapidly increasing rate and are sure to surge further in coming years. This digital information has myriad sources including individual health monitors and apps on patients' smartphones, multimillion dollar body scanners, drug safety surveillance and DNA tests.

The amount of computer storage and processing power required to handle it is enormous. Whole human genomes, which will soon be sequenced routinely, each contain 3bn letters of genetic code.

The latest scans account for tens of gigabytes per patient; the total data size of all medical images in the US today is estimated at 100 petabytes (100m billion bytes). Then there are all the additional programs and information needed to analyse and make sense of the basic data.

How to avoid drowning in the data deluge and harness it to patients' advantage is one of the biggest challenges facing health systems. The National Information Board, recently established by the National Health Service in England, gave a succinct summary of the benefits if things go well, in a Framework for Action released last month.

"Better use of data and technology has the power to improve health, transforming the quality and reducing the cost of health and care services," the NHS document says.

"It can give patients and citizens more control over their health and wellbeing, empower carers, reduce the administrative burden for care professionals and support the development of new medicines and treatments," it continues.

To help public and private health providers achieve these splendid aims, a wide array of companies from a variety of backgrounds offers a bewildering selection of systems for generating and managing data.

"There is a strong movement toward standardisation" to avoid chaos and permit the exchange of data, says Jeroen Tas, chief executive of Philips Healthcare Informatics, part of the Dutch electronics and medical equipment company. "HL7 [Health Level Seven International] is the standard for health information and Dicom [Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine] for medical images."

"The big leap forward is not just being able for the first time to digitise and aggregate data from different sources but also translating it into information the patient can act on," adds Mr Tas.

The most widely distributed new source of data is the proliferation of health apps that people run on their smartphones and personal computers.

<

The tabular content relating to this article is not available to view. Apologies in advance for the inconvenience caused.

Although the vast majority of today's consumer health products are essentially freestanding, some are beginning to link into the wide world of interconnected data.

An example is Pow Health, launched this year, which is essentially a social media site focused on health. It enables individuals and families to manage and share as much or as little information as they like about their health and sickness, with other patients and health professionals.

"There's a dashboard that we're sharing with GP practices," says Ifty Ahmed, Pow Health chief executive. "We are capturing a lot of clinical information and sharing data with researchers."

At the other end of the corporate size range is IBM, the US-based IT group, which sees healthcare as a prime application for its Watson "cognitive computing" technology - a form of artificial intelligence designed to extract useful conclusions from vast amounts of data.

"Watson recognises that we humans do not have the cognitive capacity to assess all the information available," says John Crawford, IBM healthcare industry leader for Europe. "Doctors say Watson will be most useful for diagnosing rare diseases they have never come across before."

© The Financial Times Limited 2014. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation