Booming health data field needs interpreters

Drew A. Harris, program director of health policy at the Jefferson School of Population Health, wrote this for the "Field Clinic" blog on Philly.com

I'm now living the measured life. I have a gadget strapped to my wrist that counts my steps and hours of sleep. It gives me a happy buzz when I hit my goals. I also wear a heart monitor and use a smartphone app to track my runs, bikes, and hikes. Soon, a contact lens will measure my blood sugar and a watch will track my blood oxygen.

We are at the dawn of a health data revolution. When our vital functions are fully tracked, each of us will generate more data in a few minutes than our great-grandparents did in a lifetime. Will this new data make us healthier?

Once upon a time, your doctor could summarize all that was known about you: your pulse rate, temperature, blood pressure, heart and lung sounds, and a few lab values. Doctors knew your family history and a little about where you worked and lived. They quickly analyzed all this to make a diagnosis and form a care plan.

But the effectiveness of care was limited by the supply of useful data. Many important factors couldn't be measured.

Now, data are abundant, but the physicians' analytic capacity has not grown with it. They are drowning in an ever-growing tsunami of data. Emerging technologies such as genomics (your genes), proteomics (the proteins genes make), microbiomics (the colonies of bacteria essential to bodily functions), transcriptomics (RNA) and connectomics (neural connections) will generate terabytes of clinically significant data about you.

Add to the mix the quantifiable health impact of your community, social network, socioeconomic status, and work and family life. It's an analytic nightmare. And just when your doctor can't take any more, you show up for your 15-minute visit with a Fitbit report and ask, "Hey doc, what do you think?"

Clinicians need support tools - computers that use expert protocols to spit out succinct summaries of relevant information for review at the point of care.

Health reform subsidized doctors and hospitals that installed electronic health records (EHRs). These systems hold mountains of data, but little analysis.

Facebook, Google, and Amazon can predict more from your posts, searches and purchases than the typical EHR can tell about your health. Big data firms also are applying what they've learned online.

A new profession of health data analyst will likely emerge. These experts will work with the care team to analyze trends, merge datasets, and develop better interfaces to ensure that key bits of data drive actions.

The firm that makes the Jawbone UP wristband monitor found that the recent South Napa earthquake woke 93 percent of users living within 15 miles of the epicenter. Sleep data could be used to assess local population health.

Soon, I won't have to show the doctor my Fitbit report because it will be analyzed and incorporated into a medical record, one of many data points used to predict when or if I will get sick. Data-driven care will change everything.