title: Big data in medicine is driving big changes.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To summarise current research that takes advantage of "Big Data" in health and biomedical informatics applications.
  
  
  METHODS
  Survey of trends in this work, and exploration of literature describing how large-scale structured and unstructured data sources are being used to support applications from clinical decision making and health policy, to drug design and pharmacovigilance, and further to systems biology and genetics.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The survey highlights ongoing development of powerful new methods for turning that large-scale, and often complex, data into information that provides new insights into human health, in a range of different areas. Consideration of this body of work identifies several important paradigm shifts that are facilitated by Big Data resources and methods: in clinical and translational research, from hypothesis-driven research to data-driven research, and in medicine, from evidence-based practice to practice-based evidence.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The increasing scale and availability of large quantities of health data require strategies for data management, data linkage, and data integration beyond the limits of many existing information systems, and substantial effort is underway to meet those needs. As our ability to make sense of that data improves, the value of the data will continue to increase. Health systems, genetics and genomics, population and public health; all areas of biomedicine stand to benefit from Big Data and the associated technologies.
authors.affiliation: Fernando Martin-Sanchez, Health and Biomedical Informatics Centre, The University of Melbourne, Parkville VIC 3010, Australia, E-mail: fjms@unimelb.edu.au.
authors.forename: F
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Martin-Sanchez
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Verspoor
mesh_terms: D035843:Biomedical Research; D019295:Computational Biology; D057225:Data Mining; D016208:Databases, Factual; D006801:Humans; D008490:Medical Informatics; D061108:Social Media
keywords: Medical informatics; data mining; information storage and retrieval; information systems; text mining