In The Hospital Of The Future, Big Data Is One Of Your Doctors<\/h1>\n
December 5, 2013 | 7:30 AM<\/p>\n
From our genomes to Jawbones, the amount of data about health is exploding. Bringing on top Silicon Valley talent, one NYC hospital is preparing for a future where it can analyze and predict its patients’ health needs–and maybe change our understanding of disease.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
The office of Jeff Hammerbacher at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine sits in the middle of one of the most stark economic divides in the nation. To Hammerbacher\u2019s south are New York City\u2019s posh Upper East Side townhouses. To the north, the barrios of East Harlem.<\/p>\n
What’s below is most interesting:\u00a0Minerva<\/a>, a humming supercomputer installed last year that’s named after the Roman goddess of wisdom and medicine.<\/p>\n It\u2019s rare to find a supercomputer in a hospital, even a major research center and medical school like Mount Sinai. But it\u2019s also rare to find people like\u00a0Hammerbacher<\/a>, a sort of human supercomputer who is best known for launching\u00a0Facebook\u2019s data science team<\/a>and, later, co-founding\u00a0Cloudera<\/a>, a top Silicon Valley \u201cbig data\u201d software company where he is chief scientist today. After moving to New York this year to dive into a new role as a researcher at Sinai\u2019s medical school, he is setting up a second powerful computing cluster based on Cloudera\u2019s software (it\u2019s called Demeter) and building tools to better store, process, mine, and build data models. \u201cThey generate a pretty good amount of data,\u201d he says of the hospital\u2019s existing electronic medical record system and its data warehouse that stored 300 million new \u201cevents\u201d last year. \u201cBut I would say they are only scratching the surface.\u201d<\/p>\n Combined, the circumstances make for one of the most interesting experiments happening in hospitals right now–one that gives a peek into the future of health care in a world where the amount of data about our own health, from our genomes to ourJawbone tracking devices<\/a>, is exploding.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we\u2019re trying to build is a learning health care system,\u201d says\u00a0Joel Dudley<\/a>, director of biomedical informatics for the medical school. \u201cWe first need to collect the data on a large population of people and connect that to outcomes.\u201d<\/p>\n To imagine what the hospital of the future could look like at Mount Sinai, picture how companies like Netflix and Amazon and even Facebook work today. These companies gather data about their users, and then run that data through predictive models and recommendation systems they\u2019ve developed–usually taking into account a person\u2019s past history, maybe his or her history in other places on the web, and the history of \u201csimilar\u201d users–to make a best guess about the future–to suggest what a person wants to buy or see, or what advertisement might entice them.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/b.fastcompany.net\/multisite_files\/fastcompany\/imagecache\/inline-large\/inline\/2013\/12\/3022050-inline-image001.jpg\")