Ana Ripoll, President of the Bioinformatics Barcelona Association – BIB
We live in a society that is able to generate massive amounts of data in seconds. In fact, it has been estimated that in two days we generate as much data as we did since the birth of civilization to the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003. The health system is no exception in the age of large data, now that the available data come from a variety of sources, such as electronic health records, laboratories, medical imaging systems and medical notes. In addition to these more traditional sources, we can add the data generated by the patient through electronic monitoring devices in real time, mobile applications, social networks or patients’ forums. Currently these data are scattered, disconnected, in various formats, and even in some cases without digitizing, and thus it’s difficult to process and to analyze. Extracting the valuable information all this data contained in the health system will help increase biomedical knowledge so we can advance towards a personalized, participatory, predictive and preventive medicine. Continue reading