February 13, 2017 – Big Data

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Anchor lead: Helping to improve heart valve replacement is one benefit of big data, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Discerning the differences between two types of devices used when someone has a valve in their heart replaced is now possible with the collection and analysis of a wealth of clinical parameters, often referred to as big data.  That’s as reported in a recent study in JAMA Cardiology. Mike Klag, dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, asserts that this is the future.

Klag: This is the future in many ways because we cannot do clinical trials for everything, they take too long, they’re very expensive and often by the time you’re done a big clinical trial the question may not be pertinent anymore, a new technology may have been developed, a new drug so in a sense clinical trials are always a bit behind so being able to use administrative data systems or from clinical care is going to be increasingly important because we have the ability to generate these data in real time.  :26

Klag says detecting even small differences in benefits of one treatment over another are now possible. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.