title: Developing public policy to advance the use of big data in health care.
abstract: The vast amount of health data generated and stored around the world each day offers significant opportunities for advances such as the real-time tracking of diseases, predicting disease outbreaks, and developing health care that is truly personalized. However, capturing, analyzing, and sharing health data is difficult, expensive, and controversial. This article explores four central questions that policy makers should consider when developing public policy for the use of "big data" in health care. We discuss what aspects of big data are most relevant for health care and present a taxonomy of data types and levels of access. We suggest that successful policies require clear objectives and provide examples, discuss barriers to achieving policy objectives based on a recent policy experiment in the United Kingdom, and propose levers that policy makers should consider using to advance data sharing. We argue that the case for data sharing can be won only by providing real-life examples of the ways in which it can improve health care.
authors.affiliation: Axel Heitmueller is policy fellow of the Big Data and Health Forum at the World Innovation for Summit for Health (WISH), Qatar Foundation, and an honorary fellow at the Centre for Health Policy, Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College London, in the United Kingdom. Axel.Heitmueller@imperialcollegehealthpartners.com
authors.forename: Axel
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Heitmueller
authors.affiliation: Sarah Henderson is head of forum development at WISH and a policy fellow at the Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College London.
authors.forename: Sarah
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Henderson
authors.affiliation: Will Warburton is forum director at WISH and a senior policy fellow at the Centre for Health Policy, Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College London.
authors.forename: Will
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Warburton
authors.affiliation: Ahmed Elmagarmid is executive director of the Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar Foundation, in Doha.
authors.forename: Ahmed
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Elmagarmid
authors.affiliation: Alex "Sandy" Pentland is chair of the Big Data and Health Forum for WISH and director of the Human Dynamics Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
authors.forename: Alex Sandy
authors.initials: AS
authors.lastname: Pentland
authors.affiliation: Ara Darzi is executive chair of WISH, Qatar Foundation, and director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College London.
authors.forename: Ara
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Darzi
mesh_terms: D022126:Access to Information; D014943:Global Health; D006801:Humans; D033181:Information Dissemination; D011050:Policy Making; D011640:Public Policy
keywords: Big Data; Global Health; Health Policy