Xtreme Data Warehousing – Healthcare Use Case

OK so here we start treading into some testy waters due to confidentiality and control, but this is about awareness of the possibilities to open us up for the options.  This reminds me of the movie Roadhouse with Patrick Swayze.  In the movie he goes into the emerge room after a brawl at a rough club he started bouncing at and he hands the emerge Doctor a 3" thick folio with all of his medical history.

  • Integrated Medical History
    • All treatments
    • Structured and Un-structured data – X-rays, medical freeform notes, images
    • Family Tree medical history – the doctor knows that you have a medical history of heart disease when you come into emerge unconscious and unable to answer some important question.
    • DNA encoding (designer drugs for your treatment)
    • Allows for understanding of predisposition
    • Global accessibility – you are travelling to Mexico, India or China and get sick, give them access to the information and even link them with your family physician.
  • Continuous Health Monitoring
    • Data Collection
    • Event Monitoring

This is like the GM On*Star commercial where you can run a report or you get an email giving a healthcheck update.  Or maybe you are under some special treatment or care and can your treatment facility start to warn you ahead of time based on previous experience.  Drug interactions and so forth

So is it feasible

  • Yes the technology is there and very practical

What are the issues…

  • Privacy
    • Control of accessibility
    • Accessibility globally – how
  • Ownership and Payment – where does the information reside and who pays for the infrastructure
  • Security
  • Need for extreme data quality
  1. Jim Reply

    OK, let’s find a way to get a Rapid Result. Rather than trying to solve the whole problem, what about some area that can yield rapid results? We must find some impatient people who are willing to really take some leadership and make a difference. Regulation will only change slowly but I bet there are lots of potential spots within the current framework. Leadership is required and somebody will to take a creative approach to the problem rather than the big system approach. How about some local experiment with somebody who is ready to make changes?

  2. Graham Boundy Reply

    My cell phone has a miniSD card. It’s the size of a medic-alert bracelet and can hold 2GB of data. No reason why we couldn’t carry our health records around with us at all times to be accessed by any health professional with the security certificates required to open the files.
    Of course there’s always implants if you don’t want to wear the bracelet.

  3. Stephen Reply

    Yes this issue created some healthy and lively dialogue.
    I was talking with someone yesterday about this issue and there are no shortage of end-benefits, but a complete lack of a way to start.

  4. Jim Reply

    There is great potential for a major breakthrough here but the healthcare field is so divided and in silos, change is really hard. If there was really a will to make a difference in the right places, I think data warehousing could create some major improvements in healthcare.

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