Big data is thrown around a lot as jargon, but some powerful case studies out there show how data is reshaping industries.
Today at VentureBeat’s DataBeat/Data Summit, executives from six companies from health care, fashion, education, media, transportation, and business shared examples of how they are using data to create opportunities that never existed before — and create a more personalized experience for their customers.
Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation
Joel Dudley is the director of biomedical informatics at Mt. Sinai, which is the largest private health care system in New York State. Its 6,000 physicians conduct over 3.4 million patient visits a year.
Mt. Sinai’s CEO recently made a $100 million commitment to integrate data and genomics into every aspect of its organization to create more precise, positive patient outcomes. It brought in 100 informaticians and data scientists help doctors and nurses make data-driven decisions.
“No one is more aggressive or committed to changing health care into a data-driven, science-driven practice,” Dudley said onstage. “We need to be more predictive and understand more precisely where the patients fit into our data universe, what the optimal treatments are for them to achieve the best outcomes, and how to keep them healthy the longest.”
Dudley talked about the problem of “data exhaust” in health care — a huge amount of data comes in, but it’s never stored or looked at and “goes up into the air.” Mt. Sinai aims to use this data to create a broader view of individual patients as well as to create an overarching view of its entire population to identify trends and patterns.
Genomics plays a big part in this. Mt. Sinai has collected genomic data for 25,000 patients and combines this with electronic medical record information (EMR) and lab results to create what Dudley described as a “new taxonomy of disease.”
He gave the example of Type 2 Diabetes. By creating a map of diabetes cases, along with other genetic markers, physicians can get a more nuanced picture of their patient and prescribe treatment accordingly.
