Small Data

Health care and health reform are being influenced by seemingly unrelated spheres of influence. Many industries are effected by these same interactions in banking, transportation, defense, technology, basic science, education and government.

The age in which we live is both exciting and terrifying. Now that I am a septagenerian I see it is both. And somehow we will survive, grow stronger and thrive.

The catalyst is largely information technology and cyber technology, whether it is functions for gathering data, analytics,pseudo artificial intelligence, or robotics.  All of it is shaped by bits and bytes.  Even the basic materials of the integrated circuit and computer microprocessors will undergo basic changes perhaps away from silicon to carbon or even biological compounds such as the building blocks of DNA, nucleic acids.

Rather than having a simple bit or byte, nucleic acids as we know them, offer 4 different subunits that form a lexicon for building proteins from amino acids.

Big Data is often quoted in health care for analytics, for biological and research discoveries.

We in health care are now being continuously bombarded about the essentiality of gathering more and more information. Our government is underwriting some of the costs and also placing a large burden upon not only physicians but all providers, and hospitals to enter health data into the IT infrastrucure for some future use, some of which is still not defined, and some which is truly unproven.  Despite this billions of dollars have been and will be spent on this endeavor.

There have been some precautionary notes offered from other sectors:

Viewpoint: Why your company should NOT use “Big Data”

The latest trend is “Big Data”. The original concept of Big Data was the concept of using all of the information a company collect that was being thrown away due to costs and capacity constraints. With the rapidly declining cost of storage and retrieval, combined with machine learning, we should be able to find insights in all that ‘garbage data’ and use it to make better decisions in the core business. At least that’s the theory. As far as the basic theory goes it’s all true, but it’s not the full story.

Like a lot of trends, the drive to mastering Big Data has gone a little overboard. Google searches for the term “Big Data” has grown from practically nothing in 2010 to almost 200,000 searches a month by the end of 2013

It has become so ingrained in company cultures that to say you don’t want to use Big Data is a bit like saying you are against data-driven decision making. It would be career suicide to say Big Data is a waste of company time and resources.

The graph below depicts the exponential growth of big data over time.

The details can be found at the original article on ViewPoint

The New Public Health Advertising and Social Media

This post today does not reflect approval or disapproval of the Affordable Care Act.   It does point out the means to which the administration has gone to "sell ObamaCare" to the public by riding on the coattails of famous people.


Celebrities and Public Health.

Whether your  favorite celebrity knows anything about health may be open to question.

However given the visibility of celebs such as Angelina Jolie and the topic of breast cancer; or  type II diabetes (such as Tom Hanks) many want to contribute their celebrity either due to a personal involvement with the disease or for charitable purposes.

Somewhat open to question are those who endorse a specific treatment,rather than elevating the public awareness of the disease or treatments.

Celebrities can use their enormous stage presence and visibility to the general public far more than millions of dollars spent by government in public health advertising or announcements.

Who does not know more about HIV and AIDS due to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or Michael J. Fox and Parkinsonism.



The list goes on.

Actress Angelina Jolie explained her decision to undergo a prophylactic double mastectomy to significantly reduce her risk of inherited breast cancer,

      The effects of the so-called "Angelina Jolie effect" even have reached across the pond, where breast cancer charities have reported a four-fold surge in women asking about having their breasts removed since Jolie announced she'd had the procedure, according to Daily Mail. And the number of calls Cancer Research UK's helpline received about a family history of breast cancer increased from 13 in April to 88 in May, the article noted. In response to Jolie's breast cancer media bombshell, doctors acknowledged not all women need genetic testing but all women should discuss it with their doctors, FierceHealthcare previously reported.

Kim Kardashian brought to light the importance of privacy and confidentiality in the health space and protected information by HIPAA.Some hospital employees in Los Angeles may have gone too far in their quest to "Keep Up with the Kardashians" and now have to face the consequences.

Five workers and a student research assistant at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (Calif.) were fired over privacy breaches involving patient medical records--and there is speculation that the patient was Kardashian, who gave birth to her daughter with rapper Kanye West in a birthing suite at the hospital on June 15, the Los Angeles Times reports. This event publicized HIPAA rules for the public and providers.

News correspondent Amy Robach announced that she has breast cancer and would undergo a double mastectomy--after reluctantly agreeing to have a mammogram live on-air for Good Morning America. Had she followed the United States Preventive Services Task Force 2009 guidelines for screening, it's likely she wouldn't have undergone her first mammogram until a decade later. Robach is just 40 years old and has little history of breast cancer. This brought to life the controversy of statistical evidence for screening for many diseases.

     Obama's camp took to popular comedy site Funny or Die to get the word out about the Affordable Care Act, with skits featuring Jennifer Hudson, Amy Poehler and Olivia Wilde.  Parodying TV's Scandal, Jennifer Hudson plays a "fixer" who offers up the simple (well, it should be simple) solution of signing up for coverage on Healthcare.gov to clients presenting their problems.

     The first lady stepped into the public health spotlight with her "Let's Move" campaign, encouraging schoolchildren to eat healthier foods and exercise daily--she even enlisted Sesame Street characters Elmo and Rosita to help her promote eating fruits and vegetables during an official press conference

    In fact the Obama campaign used many celebs to raise awareness of Health.gov the national website to enroll in the Affordable Care Act. As health care professionals we should not take for granted our knowledge base as compared to the public.  The Obama effort has some very funny videos that made even me laugh, and the ACA is no laughing matter.

Katherine Zeta-Jones revealed she had bipolar disorder back in 2011, shortly after husband Michael Douglas was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Zeta Jones commented on her struggle with bipolar ll (which is less severe than bipolar l), in 2011,

And then there have been comments from people such as Jenny McCarthy.  McCarthy told Oprah Winfrey she "graduated from the University of Google," to come to this idea, but she's been spreading her view that vaccinating young children for diseases like mumps results in autism in books, newspapers and on TV--much to the dismay of doctors, scientists, researchers and other celebrities.

No matter what popular culture is influenced by the media for better or worse.