El Mundo, one of the most prestigious newspapers in Spain, created a daily supplement on innovation and entrepreneurship (title Innovadores) and as an advisor to Bankinter's Future Forum I wrote this article on "Big Data and You."
Here is the translation:
Big Data and You
We
all accept that there is an abundance of data that are used to define everything
about us. The data that are collected are then harvested by all types of
entities and put together in ways that communicate more to others than we may
want to share. But with the promise that the data cannot be traced back to the
individual we release much of what is private about our lives. Nowhere is this
more evident than in the health care setting where data are being merged from
different sources to produce predictive models for deciding upon the type of
treatment an individual should receive.
The
use of big health data has been heralded as a giant leap forward in that
information from different people can be used to give a fuller picture of what
are the risk factors that we need to pay attention to. With these aggregated
data and the risk profiles they provide health care providers at every level are
equipped with an array of protocols about how to treat a patient. These data
can also provide new and compelling alternatives to what would be considered
the usual standard of care.
But
we must proceed with great caution. Recent
research[1] funded
by the National Heart Blood Lung Institute in the U.S. documented that commonly
used risk assessments of atherosclerotic
cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) overestimated the risk by 37 to 154% in men
and from 8 to 67% in women. That translates into a huge amount of people
getting treatment they did not need.
Big
data are the results of combining lots of smaller bits of information. How big
data are gathered and how they are merged can become a problem. This is made
worse if at the point of care risk scores replace talking to the patient or the
ever elusive listening to what the patient says. The promise of health care
providers to “Do no harm” can be compromised by the overreliance on tools that
are meant to add to the clinical conversation and not dominate them.
Jane
L Delgado, PhD, MS,
President
and CEO
National
Alliance for Hispanic Health
Washington,
DC
janeonhealth@gmail.com
[1] Andrew P. DeFilippis, MD, MSc*; Rebekah Young, PhD*; Christopher J. Carrubba, MD; John W. McEvoy, MB, BCh, BAO;
Matthew J. Budoff, MD; Roger S. Blumenthal, MD; Richard A. Kronmal, PhD; Robyn
L. McClelland, PhD; Khurram Nasir, MD, MPH; and Michael J. Blaha, MD, MPH. An
Analysis of Calibration and Discrimination Among Multiple Cardiovascular Risk
Scores in a Modern Multiethnic Cohort. Ann Intern Med. 2015;162(4):266-275.
doi:10.7326/M14-1281
