California is currently realizing its potential to use "big data" to support research and medicine, using and combining research databases to collect huge swathes of information.
At the 2012 Health Information Exchange Stakeholder Summit, one of the major presentations was how "big data" was being used to help researchers, doctors and public health officials alike.
The state’s public health registries for immunization and cancer are already producing useful data and are nearly ready to provide them to clinicians, according to the Summit website.
Michael Hogarth, MD, medical director of clinical registries of UC Davis, helped develop a meta registry combining information from registries on breast health, cancer and orthopedics.
"It takes a certain level of computerization to pull this off," Hogarth said in his presentation.
UC Davis is part of an effort to combine information from five University of California system hospitals.
Kaiser Permanente is using its combined databases to find subtle connections between medications and conditions that would not normally be researched together, such as antidepressant use during the first trimester of pregnancy possibly being connected to autism disorders.
Public health officials, meanwhile, are using the public health registries to remind patients and providers of their immunization schedule, which can keep infectious diseases from gaining a foothold on Californians.
The panelists at the presentation acknowledged the potential for problems with these databases. With the great ambition to create larger and larger databases come concerns about medical privacy and how to manage the data among the different computer systems.
