When Big = Smart: Harvesting Data to Improve Health

Personalized medicine offered a promise to fields that require a nuanced approach to care. Oncology, neurology, and endocrinology are all areas of medicine where there are seemingly no one size fits all cures. Because of this, there is a great need to better understand the role of big data in making smart decisions about medical treatments.

There are many ways to collect and harvest big data to better determine the course of care for individuals suffering from cancer, neurological, or metabolic diseases. By collecting many types of data, from demographics to DNA to treatment response, scientists have the resources to evaluate the disease state and begin to match groups of people with specific treatment approaches.

There are several ways to analyze big data. Traditional approaches such as binary logistic regression and discriminant function analysis aim to classify people into treatment groups. Essentially, you can enter several variables and these techniques create a model that decides which patient belongs in which treatment group. Sensitivity (a person gets in the right group) and specificity (the wrong person doesn’t get in the wrong group) measurements allow the physician to understand how accurate the test model is, and scientists can work to improve these models, and thus, treatment outcomes (there are no perfect models).

One of the most exciting variables that can be added to these models is data from wearable technologies. Wearable electrodes, implants, and biosensors are all capable of relaying data to prediction models in real time. This can improve treatment outcomes by notifying physicians when treatments are working; and when they’re not. By creating big data repositories, we are able to make smart decisions about the future of treatment for the individual and for the entire field.

Using Mobile Technology to Personalize Treatment for Chronic Diseases

Mobile technologies have had a major impact on American life. We now get our news, manage our calendars, shop, and connect with friends and family on tiny computers we keep in our pockets. And smart phones are ubiquitous. Leveraging smart phone technology to improve healthcare has become a kind of holy grail; finding an intersection between the fields of medicine and mobile technology.

There are several factors that make this match so intriguing: chronic diseases need to be managed on a daily basis, smart phones are a unique platform to reach patients several times a day, and advances in technology make this process more directly applicable to the medical field. Diabetes is, indeed, a good example of a chronic disease that requires daily and even hourly management. When people with both type 1 & 2 diabetes eat healthier and exercise they have improved treatment outcomes. Smart phone applications can help track food intake and manage activities that ultimately lead to healthy lifestyles.

Beyond this, there are some companies that are trying to promote healthy lifestyles and keep patients connected with the physicians more regularly. Companies like Welldoc are keeping people with diabetes in better health by treating the whole patient from their mobile device – and sending the results to their doctor. This allows physicians to track things like dietary habits and even blood sugar. In this way, the physician knows in real time if the patient is in need of further intervention.

As medicine and mobile technologies combine their common interest, there is a unique opportunity to personalize medicine by treating the person, as well as improve medical research by collecting big data. It will be interesting to see what the future brings and whether predictive modeling can be applied to successfully improve treatment outcomes; not just for diabetes but for all chronic diseases.