Kauffman: Leverage big data to control healthcare costs | Government Health IT

“Providing access to ‘big data’ is a giant step to curing many healthcare ills and taking control of the healthcare costs, according to a new report released today by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a private non-partisan organization. The Kauffman Foundation Task Force put forth incremental approaches to achieving efficient healthcare reform – to address what it called ‘America's most urgent public policy problem.’ The foundation released its report April 19 at the The Atlantic's fourth annual Health Care Forum in Washington, D.C. The event focuses on improving the cost-benefit balance in American healthcare through open access to medical data. The report, ‘Valuing Health Care: Improving Productivity and Quality,’ is based on the recommendations of 31 experts from related fields convened by the  Kauffman Foundation 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?’ ... ‘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...’”