A lot of big changes changed the face of health IT in 2014, from the Affordable Care Act to huge investments in electronic health records and other IT technology like VNAs. However, big data is another buzz word within the health care industry that's been whispered over the past few years, but now it seems like all of the chess pieces have been put into play so that analytics can finally make its impact on the medical sector.

According to Harvard Business Review, a total of 2.5 quintillion terabytes of data were generated every day in 2012. What's more, officials estimate that as much data is generated in two days as compared to the dawn of civilization to 2003. Needless to say, we have a lot of data on our hands, and the health care and research industries are ready to use it. Despite the large revenues that health care enjoy, the medical sector "is just getting its feet wet" when it comes to big data compared to other industries.

First comes data integration
Extracting the data sets that pertain to the interest of health IT is going to be the biggest obstacle for creating a specific health care or research strategy. Having large cohorts of data about specific demographics is easy for linking to in political campaigns and delineating business markets, according to Harvard Business Review. However, securely linking these same groups of data sets in a health care setting can be a bit more nuanced, as many researchers are looking for information about a specific demographic or subgroup.

A lack of standardization
Another major hurdle? Most health care data in the U.S. is stored up in departmental silos due to a lack of standardization in the U.S. health care market. There are many moving parts at play within the system, including insurance claims, diagnostic images, monitoring devices and physician notes, that are all hard generate heterogeneously. Extracting and integrating these large amounts of data from so many different sources can prove problematic as a result. However, as interoperability is also a future focus for organizations alongside big data and analytics, it seems that these trends could change in the future.

In fact, according to EHR Intelligence, one of the most notable predictions for big data heading into 2015 is the "rise in the democratization of health information." Because major efforts have been made to personalize health care over the past few years, delivery approaches are changing the way data is stored.

Predictive analytics
Another interesting facet of big data is predictive analytics, which utilized clinical data to generate preventative care for the patient and his or her environment. Not only does this make things much more streamlined for providers, but it also allowed doctors to choose the right treatments and interventions, creating more meaningful patient care. Many health IT officials believe that this aspect of analytics will grow as value-based care guidelines become more common.

As healthcare providers store an increasing amount of information on electronic health record and clinical archiving systems, the topic of how to best use all of the data becomes more important. VNAs can provide a significant degree of flexibility because of their ability to share and manipulate both DICOM and non-DICOM images. This increases interoperability among the different parties who handle big data. One technology that is driving imaging growth is vendor neutral archives. VNA technology is scalable beyond a department-level archive and has the capability to store, organize, query and retrieve a wide variety of formats.

News brought to you by TeraMedica, Inc., leaders in health care enterprise imaging (VNA) solutions.