Dr. Riskin is the CEO of Health Fidelity, a leading provider of natural language processing solutions. He is also a Consulting Assistant Professor of Surgery at Stanford University and practices one day a week out of the Stanford affiliate hospitals. I recently had the opportunity to get his thoughts on how data-driven innovations are transforming the health care industry.
Castro: In what ways do you see data changing health care today?
Riskin: Data is used daily to define a new generation of healthcare. Not only do patients do research on the internet, request medical support by e-mail (in some systems), and share their own medical stories online, but the actual care delivered now includes apps and remote technologies that offer supplemental care.
The most fundamental change related to healthcare is the redefinition of practice, often known as data-driven healthcare. Data-driven healthcare is a big data approach to healthcare, leveraging information learned from treating millions of patients to personalize care for the few. This turns a half century of medical practice using evidence based medicine on its head. Instead …