In just over a week, the team here at SiliconANGLE will be setting off for Cambridge, Massachusetts for the 7^th Annual MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium held on the MIT campus. The theme this year is ‘Big Data Demands Good Data’. In preparation for the event, we will be presenting a synopsis of some of the important topics scheduled to be covered in conjunction with other academic and real-world applications that apply.

One of the first sessions, to be presented by Dr. David Levine, Vice President of Informatics/Medical Director of Comparative Data and Informatics for United Healthcare, will address the need for improving risk models based on predictive analytics.  According to the abstract of Dr. Levine’s presentation, he will discuss how the advent of and improvements in data collection can be utilized to drive improved performance in health administration and patient care.

Writing recently for FierceHealthIT, Dan Bowman discussed how a recent survey of hospital CIOs found big data in the medical field was severely lacking in its efficacy. Bowman cites a healthsystemCIO.com survey in which 76 percent of respondents claimed their vendors were too often over-promising and under-delivering with their big data solutions.

In the same survey, it was found a full 52 percent of respondents admitting to not using their big data applications at anything approaching any level of sophistication. This figure is supported by the fact two-thirds of those who took the survey claimed their organization had neither the manpower nor the skill to take advantage of analytical tools at a high level. Each of these factor into one CIO stating the big data market, as it pertains to healthcare, isn’t likely to reach maturity for at least a few more years.

The challenge, it appears, is for the healthcare field to better understand the mountains of data they collect and learn how to better pore over it to help in establishing better predictive models for patient care and hospital administration. According to Chris Belmont, CIO at New Orleans’ Ochsner Health System, “We have the data points. We just have to do a better job of getting our hands around the data and understanding it better.”

What is the real-world benefit of achieving an optimal understanding and usage of data in the medical field though? Jeff Kelly of Wikibon.org discussed the necessity of improving the collection and analysis of big data for those fields represented in the Industrial Internet in a posting entitled ‘The Industrial Internet and Big Data Analytics: Opportunities and Challenges’. Shockingly, he stated as much as 43 percent of an estimated $2.75 trillion in healthcare spending (for 2012 alone) was applied to unnecessary procedures and administrative waste. That abhorrent figure will be significantly reduced as the Industrial Internet is increasingly utilized by hospital CIOs to target administrative inefficiencies, eliminate waste and improve patient outcomes.

Dr. Levine’s presentation seems to aim at addressing the better utilization of data for improved patient outcomes. His work with United Healthcare, in tandem with their membership organizations, is striving to make predictive models more meaningful and actionable with the aim toward driving improved performance.