How big tech helps manage health care data's explosive growth
Former Cleveland Clinic CEO Dr. Toby Cosgrove on efforts to rein in drug prices, how tech innovation is improving health care and the latest advances in cancer research.
Every 73 days, the amount of health care data doubles, so to ensure the industry is able to keep up with the exponential growth of information, it’s beginning to heavily rely on big tech, according to the former CEO of the Cleveland Clinic.
“Interestingly, we’re having an explosion in healthcare,” Dr. Toby Cosgrove said on Tuesday during an interview with FOX Business’ Maria Bartiromo, “which is one, a, problem, and also an opportunity.”
Each year, there’s 5,600 medical journals releasing about 800,000 articles – “and no doctor can possibly keep up with that,” Cosgrove said – that will likely be stored in the cloud via machine learning for people who manage all of the data.
“The other opportunity is when you have this huge amount of data is to assign [artificial intelligence] and machine learning to it,” Cosgrove said. “We’re going to find things we never expected before.”
And Cosgrove would know: This July, he joined Google as an executive adviser to the Google Cloud Health and Life Sciences team, which is partially tasked with using the power of data to advance health care.
Google Cloud previously worked with the Colorado Center for Personalized Medicine and Health Data Compass to help clinicians and researchers “identify patterns in patient data, helping to lower costs and improve outcomes,” according to Healthcare IT News.
“Think about how much time and effort and money it costs to do a drug trial,” Cosgrove said. “We quite likely could shorten that by sophisticated analysis and reduce the cost and time to get a drug to the public.”