Digitized information is ubiquitous, a digital flood creating puddles and lakes, creeks and torrents, of

data: numbers, words, music, images, video. Most recently, the rapid growth in the use of mobile
devices—smart phones, laptops, tablets, personal sensors—is generating a data deluge; most of the
world’s data has been created within the last two years.1 For the more than two billion people2 who
use the Internet for email, Facebook (70 petabytes and 2700 multiprocessor nodes itself)3, LinkedIn,
Twitter, commenting, blogging, or downloading information and entertainment, digital data flows in a
deepening river through our everyday lives, feeding an ocean of global information and noise.

Extremely large data volumes at high velocities (known as Extreme or Big Data), were originally the
realm of supercomputers, nuclear physics, military simulations and space travel. Late in the 20th
century, bigger and faster data proliferated in airline and bank operations, particularly with the growth
of credit cards. Starting in 1990, The Human Genome Project was the moon launch of Big Data in
healthcare, a data-intensive research effort that pushed the limits of available data processing
technology. Increasingly powerful hardware and software, improvements in IT data management and
integration, new analytics tools, and accumulating experience using Big Data in finance, research,
entertainment and consumer marketing, are building a foundation for the increasing use of Big Data and
analytics in healthcare.

The potential of Big Data allows us to hope to slow the ever-increasing costs of care, help providers
practice more effective medicine, empower patients and caregivers, support fitness and preventive self-
care, and to dream4 about more personalized medicine. Yet, as with the Internet, social media, and
cloud computing, early enthusiasts are creating hyperbolic expectations about how and how quickly Big
Data will transform healthcare.

A number of issues challenge the adoption and success of healthcare Big Data, including privacy and
security, who owns the data, and the regulatory labyrinth. Furthermore, real advances depend on better
ways to exploit the disconnected puddles and lakes of existing data (e.g., health records, clinical trial
data, actuarial information) as well as better ways to generate, capture, analyze and make use of the
streams of new kinds of data (genomics, sensor readings, population and disease tracking) that are
about to flood healthcare.

This report will introduce readers to Big Data and explore how it is becoming a growing force in the
changing healthcare landscape. Using the power of the Internet, we researched the coming of Big Data
to healthcare, and then interviewed, in person, by phone and via email, more than 30 companies in the
emerging healthcare Big Data ecosystem.