Opening Up Big Data is the Big Solution to Curing Health Care Ills, according to Kauffman Report

“Cost trends in U.S. health care consistently increase at about 2.5 percentage points faster than the general rate of inflation – clearly an unsustainable rate. To address what it called "America's most urgent public policy problem," the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation released a report at The Atlantic's fourth annual Health Care Forum in Washington today that focuses on improving the cost-benefit balance in American health care through open access to medical data. The conference will be live streamed at http://events.theatlantic.com, and tweeters can follow the conversation on @Atlantic_Live, with the hashtag #HealthCare2012. The report, ‘Valuing Health Care: Improving Productivity and Quality,’  is based on the recommendations of 31 experts from related fields, whom the Kauffman Foundation convened to reframe thinking around the question, ‘How can the productivity and value of American health care be increased, in both the short-term and long-term?’ ‘Rather than look for a 'one-shot-fix' solution, the task force focused on incremental reforms that cumulatively can both reduce costs and enhance the value of health care delivered to Americans, regardless of whether and how the Affordable Care Act is implemented,’ said Robert Litan, vice president of research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation and a task force co-organizer. ‘The underlying thread to the recommendations is leveraging big medical data.’ ‘Using proper safeguards, we need to open the information that is locked in medical offices, hospitals and the files of pharmaceutical and insurance companies," said John Wilbanks, Kauffman senior fellow and an author of the report. "For example, combining larger datasets on drug response with genomic data on patients could steer therapies to the people they are most likely to help. This could substantially reduce the need for trial-and-error medicine, with all its discomforts, high costs and sometimes tragically wrong guesses.’ Specifically, the report recommends: [1] Unleashing the power of information by breaking down silos and encouraging data sharing between research centers, medical offices, pharmaceutical companies, insurance firms and others... [2] Funding more translational, cross-cutting research, with larger average grants made available to larger teams, many of them with participants from multiple institutions; and requiring collaboration across research institutions. [3] Reforming medical malpractice systems to streamline new drug approvals and remove counter-productive restrictions on health insurance premiums. [4] Empowering patients by, among other means, providing unbiased information on treatment options' benefits and drawbacks, and helping them make choices about the relevant lifestyle implications and risk-reward tradeoffs...”