ABSTRACT
This chapter first defines briefly the meaning and key elements of Big Data, the sources of which currently includes data from electronic health records, claim data from health insurances, and data registry from healthcare providers and payers. This chapter then discusses the potential benefits of Big Data in medicine, including the use of Big Data in making healthcare delivery more effective and efficient, in making medical diagnoses and therapeutics more accurate, in facilitating new drug discovery, as well benefits for disease prevention and public health. This chapter also points out some of the challenges facing the implementation of Big Data and the hurdles on achieving the full benefit from Big Data in medicine. These challenges and hurdles include accuracy of data entry, data noise, inherent weakness of medical data, human judgement correctness, financial constraints, inequality in utilization, technical limitation, and administrative policies.
