What are the bigdata opportunities in healthcare? Today, BigData techniques are already employed by startups because BigData technology today can be very cost effectively used to perform analytics and gives startups an edge on the cost and capabilities front. Big what are the opportunities in heatlhcare for established companies? I’ll offer the thought that it can be broken into two main categories. The categories reflect the fact that there are in-place data assets that will be in place for quite awhile. Its very difficult to move an entire infrastructure to a new technology base overnight. It is true that if some semblance of modern architecture (messaging, interfaces for data access) is in place today, the movement can be much faster because the underlying implementation can be changed without changing downstream applications. ...

There was a recent set of articles quoting ProPublica’s data analysis of Medicare Part D data. ProPublica acquired the data through the Freedom of Information Act and integrated the data with drug information and provider data. As a side note there has also been the recent publishing of CMS pricing data using socrata dataset publishing model (an API factory). (Side Note: You can plug into the data navigator at CMS). You can view various trends and aggregations of data to compare a provider against others and navigate the data to gain insight into the script behavior of Medicare Part D providers. If you review the methodology used to create the data, you’ll realize that there are many caveats and just reading through some of the analysis, you realize that a simple evaluation of the data is insufficient to identify actionable responses to insights. You have to dig deep to see if a trend is really significant or an artifact of incomplete analysis. Yes, there is danger in not understanding the data enough. ...

I was listening to a TEDTalk recently about education. One of the ideas in the talk was that children are not receiving the education they need. Many of the education programs, especially at the federal level, try to force a common structure, standardized tests, on students and this has the effect that teachers teach to the test. By teaching to the test, the curriculum normalizes to a focus on the test content. Essentially this has led to the same curriculum for all students. After all, they all need to take the test. ...

I was speaking to a friend the other day and they mentioned they were working on some metadata analysis. He had built a MS Access database to import the metadata. He found the going quick tricky as the analysis they were performing is called “data lineage” and they were having difficulty. He also wanted to analyze mappings between fields in the database as well as mappings between lists of values (a list of value is like the set of values you see in a dropdown box on a user interface). All of this seemed like social networking to me. ...

A long time ago, when the first financial crisis hit around the savings and loan (S&L) industry in the 1980 I remember that there was a thread of conversation around using long term interest rates to make short-term bets. The idea was that by borrowing long term at a lower rate, you could seek to play with assets on a short-term and make money. That’s not a new concept, its just that this behavior promoted playing at the boundaries of the risk envelope. ...