Is Data Sharing a Panacea for Global Health?
Data is one of the most promising tools in the medical community’s toolkit to help improve health and reduce healthcare costs around the world—if only its practitioners could figure out data sharing.
According to Dr. Stanley Huff, a clinical professor at the University of Utah who’s spent his career studying the intersection of medicine and technology, the next leap forward in medicine won’t be the development of a new therapy or drug. Instead, the innovation with the farthest-reaching impacts will be data sharing among the global medical community.
“There’s tremendous opportunity, and there’s so much that has already been discovered with big data techniques that have led to new knowledge and improved care,” says Dr. Huff, who teaches biomedical informatics at the University of Utah and serves as the chief medical informatics officer at , a not-for-profit healthcare system in Utah and Idaho.
Reflecting on his more than 40-year career, Dr. Huff says that he’s seen the most innovation during the past decade, thanks to advances in technologies like genomic testing, artificial intelligence and big data analytics. As a result, doctors and researchers have been able to find insights that were impossible to discover in smaller data sets—and Dr. Huff believes that it’s just the beginning.
But before anyone can fully reap the benefits of big data’s promise, medical practitioners around the world must commit to sharing their data.
Experts like Dr. Huff and Tom Jackiewicz—CEO of Keck Medicine at the University of Southern California and president of the Global Health Insight Network (GHIN), a nascent data-sharing effort—agree on the immense opportunity to improve healthcare outcomes and reduce costs by sharing data, although a number of major challenges remain. Chief among them is the sensitivity of health data, and the industry’s plodding acceptance of new tech.
Despite these hurdles, the medical community largely recognizes the importance—and urgency—of freeing healthcare data from its silos.
