Email
Font ResizeIf Silicon Valley has an official theme this year, it's "Big Data." Just about every corner of the tech industry is talking about the vast amount of information we are generating, how companies are collecting it and what can be done with it.
Turns out that obsession with Big Data extends to medicine as well. At the FutureMed 2012 conference this week in Silicon Valley, the thread running through nearly all the presentations was the tidal wave of information we'll soon have about our bodies. And, sadly, how ill-prepared individuals and their doctors are to use it.
"We have so much data now that we can really get creative about how we prevent and diagnose disease," said Daniel Kraft, the conference organizer and executive director of the FutureMed department at Singularity University. "The trick now is how to make that data useful."
Like so many other advances in technology, the coming tsunami of personal health information holds enormous potential for good -- if we just figure out how to use it wisely. The more we know, the better job we can do preventing and treating disease. If that happens, we may achieve the fantasy of better treatment for lower costs that so many health care reform advocates have spent so much time pursuing.
There has been a tremendous amount of progress collecting the data. We know far more about the human genome, for instance, than ever before, and there are all sorts of devices, from sophisticated
And in the view of many of the speakers, who came from the fields of medicine, medical policy and artificial intelligence, we're on the cusp of an era where the amount of biomedical information we'll be collecting will explode. That's because the cost of many of biomedical gadgets is rapidly declining while their performance and features are increasing, a kind of medical parallel to Moore's Law for computing.
But then comes the big problem of how to get people to act on this data. There's a lot of information, and it might be too complicated for the average person to understand. And even if we do understand it and know what we should do, well, will we actually do it? I mean, I know it's probably not a good idea to lie around eating french fries and drinking beer all day, yet that is not enough to prevent me from doing it.
"We need to give patients a sense of relevance, of why this data matters," said Thomas Goetz, executive editor of Wired magazine, during a talk called "Leveraging Data in Healthcare."
"And we need to figure, out what are the incentives for them to act on that data."
Kraft suggested that part of the solution is to create a dashboard of our biomedical information. Rather than wading through all the raw data, people need a system that brings the most important information to their attention and tells them what to do about it.
But the impact will always be limited unless physicians embrace the use of data to a far greater extent. And that's harder than you might imagine; in an era where we're still trying to figure out how to digitize our basic health care records, building even more sophisticated systems to rapidly transfer and analyze information between doctors and patients seems like a pipe dream.
Even if that happens, many doctors might be resistant to relying on this data for cultural reasons, or simply lack the training to take advantage of it.
"How does a doctor treat a patient who walks into the office with their genome?" asked Stephen Quake, professor of bioengineering at Stanford University.
There is hope. Some speakers looked to advances in artificial intelligence to make it easier for us to analyze and understand our own health information. Another speaker predicted that we'll see a boom in jobs for genetic counselors to help people and doctors wrap their brains around personal health data.
It seems clear that machines, computers and software are capable of delivering a revolution in health care, a future that feels so possible and tantalizingly close. The barriers, for now, continue to be us hopelessly imperfect humans, and the flawed, inflexible systems we've built to deliver health care.
Contact Chris O'Brien at 415-298-0207 or cobrien@mercurynews.com. Follow him at Twitter.com/obrien.
