Big Data…Big Medicine

“Big data” has enormous potential to transform medicine by revealing patterns among diseases, genes, lifestyles, geographical areas, and countless other parameters. In addition, benefits and side effects of specific medications or treatments could be more easily identified, even in small subsets of individuals. But the barriers to harnessing the power of big data for this purpose are many, not the least of which is the importance of maintaining patient confidentiality.

For this reason, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently announced a program called Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K), which is aimed at developing a comprehensive strategy to catalog and index health-related datasets for building a searchable, online, digital library. Known as the Biomedical and healthCAre Data Discovery and Indexing Ecosystem (BioCADDIE), the three-year project will draw on the expertise of biomedical librarians as well as researchers to increase the usefulness of data that’s already being collected in a variety of formats, while maintaining a clear distinction between published and private information. It is hoped that encouraging the sharing and re-use of biomedical data will accelerate the pace of medical discoveries while lowering cost.