Breakthrough in access to data for multiple uses

In healthcare, if we grasp the particularity of healthcare data as proposed here in the form of the 5 letters (V for Variability, N for large and small Numbers, C for ever-changing Diagnostic Categories, P for the profoundly Probabilistic nature of healthcare events, and T for their registration in Long Times), we see the major breakthrough represented by the massification of healthcare data, and its access and mobilization within the framework of healthcare decisions or analysis. This issue is particularly crucial, given the diversity of uses and the stakes involved.

Medicine in the age of Big Data is already giving us a glimpse of a medicine in which information technologies are generating a third pole in the patient-caregiver relationship, a pole represented by quantified objective data, Big Data, of which the caregiver is the user and interpreter. We might even...