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With 'Obamacare' Kicking In, Microsoft Sees a Health-Data Windfall
curtwoodward writes "Now that President Obama's federal health care reform is past its major political hurdles — and with renewed focus on out-of-control costs in healthcare — companies that sell 'big data' software are licking their chops. The reason: Healthcare has huge piles of information that is being used in new ways, to track patient admissions, spending, and much more. From hospitals to insurance companies, they'll all need new ways of crunching those numbers. It's basically an entirely new field that will dwarf the spending growth in traditional data-heavy industries like finance, retail and marketing, a Microsoft regional sales GM says."
Rail against the out-of-control government that gives us the TSA, the Patriot Act, and summarily executes US citizens.
Then cheer it on when it takes over 1/6 of the US economy?
And you claim to care about your rights and freedoms?
WHY THE FUCK DO YOU WANT TO GIVE THAT OVERWEENING GOVERNMENT THAT MUCH *MORE* POWER?!?!?!
US system is FUBAR, 50million uninsured, huge numbers of medical induced bankruptcies (for the heinous crime of being unlucky), lower life expectancy.
Nationalised single payer with optional extra private coverage is demonstrably cheaper and has (on average) better outcomes. Anyone with half a brain would get behind establishing it in the US. Oh and while you are at it do something about malpractice tort reform - the major cause of excessive medical costs.
i work at a major medical research institution. A few years ago, our CIO showed us a graph of data they'd gone through showing a large spike in heart attacks in otherwise healthy men. The spike then dropped a few years later. Normally someone wouldn't be looking at this data, so it wasn't until after the spike was gone that this was investigated. Turned out that Vioxx had been put on the market about a year before the spike started, and was pulled off the market about 6 months or so before the spike dropped off.
Getting massive amounts of data (anonymized of course) can show trends in public health that can give us a lot of information and save lives and money.
(and yes, I hate the term 'big data'. No sense of scale of how big it is.)
I'm biased, as my entire job is building those systems so many people refer to as "big data" - but the marketing is terrible. The technology itself is quite good, and makes a huge amount of sense. The problem is, companies traditionally used to doing data stuff for large corporations (ie, EMC, Oracle) are pissing themselves. This destroys their entire business model - so they're flooding the market with crap trying to avoid losing absolute boatloads of money and accounts to these technologies.
Talk about big data with those companies all you like, and they won't mention the actual reason hadoop and the like are a big deal:
1- It's all open source. Don't wanna pay? Self support.
2- It's all designed to run on the cheapest commodity hardware you can find. Why buy appliances with huge markups?
This has companies used to huge margins on appliances and software shitting themselves. They tried FUD with single point of failure stuff, and now that that's solved, they're stuffing infiniband into custom rack designs and saying how much better it is. Meanwhile you can buy 4x the gear for that same price.
Is it a buzzword? Yup. Is it saturated with marketing? Yup. Is it a stupid idea? Hell no.
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Hospitals aren't buying into software because of "Obamacare" (or the Affordable Care Act, if brevity isn't your thing). Hospitals are buying into software because of the HITECH act, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). They're getting more Medicare reimbursement for showing meaningful use of their software, so that's the trigger, not the ACA.