Perspectives on Big Data applications of health information

The potential of Big Data applications that consider all of the above levels of health information lies in the possibility of combining and integrating de-identified health information to allow secondary uses of data. This is the use and re-use of various sources of health information for purposes in addition to the direct clinical care of specific patients or the direct investigation of specific biomedical research hypotheses. Current applications include: epidemiological and pharmacovigilance studies, facilitating recruitment to randomized controlled trials, carrying out audits and benchmarking studies, financial and service planning, and ultimately supporting the generation of novel biomedical research outcomes.