Is Big Data a Big Deal…or Not?

Session Overview

The term “Big Data” emerged from Silicon Valley in 2003 to describe the unprecedented volume and velocity of data that was being collected and analyzed by Yahoo, Google, eBay, and others. They had reached an affordability, scalability and performance ceiling with traditional relational database technology that required the development of a new solution, not being met by the relational data base vendors. Through the Apache Open Source consortium, Hadoop was that new solution. Since then, Hadoop has become the most powerful and popular technology platform for data analysis in the world. But, healthcare being the information technology culture that it is, Hadoop’s adoption in healthcare operations has been slow. In this session, we will explore several questions: Why should healthcare leaders and executives care about this technology? What makes Hadoop so attractive and rapidly adopted in other industries but not in healthcare? Why is Big Data a bigger deal to them than healthcare? What do they see that we don’t and are we missing the IT boat again? How is the cloud reducing the barriers to adoption by commoditizing the skilled labor impact at the local healthcare organizational level? This session is intended to be valuable to both technical and non-technical audiences, as we explore the convergence of Big Data technology and Healthcare’s Age of Analytics.