Big data can also help save lives

big data can help to companies and large investors to earn more money, reach more customers or identify market trends before anyone else.Just remember that peculiar data analyst played by Christian Bale in the movie 'The big bet'.Let's remember, we're in the years before the Great Recession.The expert incarnated by Bale, one good day, is dedicated to look in detail and collate the behavior of mortgages in the years before the real estate crisis in the United States, and, of course, he notices that it is a matter of time before the system collapses. Related

Crossing data here and there, see before anyone else that a legion of homebuyers in Florida or California simply won't be able to return the huge amount of money they have asked the bank to acquire their overvalued homes.both the character of Bale (in fiction), and his reference in real life, became billionaires.Thanks to the big data they could predict the future, and that is a lottery.

But big data not only serves to amass a fortune. It can also save lives and serve to better manage hospitals and healthcare costs in general .A very good example Basic enough to understand it.Searches that millions of people do on the Internet (on Google, Wikipedia or on social networks) at a given time about a medical condition can help detect a pandemic in advance.This way, authorities can react and Collect vaccines on time or establish a seat belt to prevent infection.

A study from the University of Valencia revealed a few years ago that the analysis of the data offered by platforms such as Wikipedia on cases of influenza hardly differ from the official ones.And, in addition, it should be taken into account that the internet gives its information "almost in real time ", which is vital when addressing a sanitary problem of draft.

Thus, there are those who argue that the big data could have avoided the widespread alarm around the 2009 influenza A pandemic, the famous swine flu.It must be remembered that on that occasion it was questioned much the management of organizations such as WHO or the ministries of health of various countries, supposedly influenced by the economic interests of large pharmaceutical companies.

The case of Vioxx

But there are compelling examples that big data has already saved lives.One of them happened at the beginning of this 21st century.By that time, Vioxx, an analgesic of last generation developed by Merck, arrived to become a bestseller of medicines, with sales every year estimated at more than 2.5 billion dollars.

Everything was going great for Merck with this anti-inflammatory until Kaiser Permanente, a California health consortium, along with the FDA, the US government agency responsible for ensuring the safety of medications, resorted to data analysis techniques that They revealed a disturbing truth.

Reviewing the medical history of more than a million patients treated with Vioxx, they discovered that the probability of having a heart attack tripled in these patients.As a result, Vioxx's success story came to an end. big data prevented many people from dying from the cardiovascular risks of the medicine.

The big data applied to medicine can predict the evolution of pandemics and take drugs with lethal side effects off the market.It has also facilitated DNA sequencing in recent years.It can also help improve the management of the health system in general.If the health system were able to properly store and process all the information it generates (from the handwritten notes of the doctors and the impressions of the patients to the records and treatments), the professionals would be able to refine individual diagnoses and solutions to collective problems.

The doctors and the big data on a small scale

In other words, the technology could raise to great Scale what the doctors already do every day in their office every day.And it is that a doctor makes a diagnosis and prescription based on their observations, but also of the episodes that are repeated between their patient base.After all, a part of his professional practice is based on a sort of rudimentary statistical analysis, of big data on a small scale.

Another reason to think that big data will be key in the medicine of the future is the avalanche of devices of all kinds that today generate medical data, and that in the future they will exponentially multiply the information of health available.We talk about the sensors and devices that from home or in the hospital will inform the medical professionals, through apps in the smartphone , for example, of the smallest changes in the evolution of diabetes, hypertension or cholesterol.It is the Internet of Things applied to the world of health care.