The value to Europe of harnessing ‘Big Data’

By European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM) Executive Director Denis Horgan

Economically, Europe has lagged behind the US in productivity for the past 20 years – and the gap is getting wider. One way to address this would be by significantly upping the use of information technology across the EU’s 28 member states, given that recent figures have suggested that Big Data could save the public sector €100 billion in ‘operational efficiency improvements’.

Its role in improving health care - and thus the quality of life as well as actual lifespan - of a potential 500 million patients in the EU cannot be overstated and its ability to lower costs is substantial and equally significant.

The massive expansion in computing power down the decades and incredible new technologies coming to light all of the time have seen, among other benefits, the price of using data in healthcare plummet.

Modern-day ‘wearables’ are already revolutionizing health care given, for example, remote monitoring of patients and ‘smart’ pill-boxes that encourage them to take their prescribed medicine. These exciting advances lead to greater independence for the patient, more days in the workplace and a lot less time spent in expensive hospital beds.

In fact, has been estimated that simply by reducing non-adherence in prescribed medicines sitting on home shelves could save Europe €125 billion every year and reduce premature deaths by 200,000 in the same timeframe.

Using Big Data also promises to significantly improve efficiency through facilitating better decision making and encouraging smarter investment. This is all good news for the European economy and, of course, every patient or potential patient in the EU.

In the specific case of personalised medicine, Big Data can be best summed-up as being the huge and ever-growing amount of health information, derived from a variety of sources, and its use in exciting and innovative ways to tailor outcomes to the individual. After all, it is abundantly clear that one-size-fits-all does not work in a medical context with a certain patient taking good advantage of a particular treatment while another derives little or no value from it.

Using Big Data properly would allow us to understand the cause of disease, assist in the development of cutting-edge therapies and new drugs geared towards the individual. But this individual approach relies upon advanced technologies and processes to collect, manage and analyze the data pool before it is interpreted for the benefit of medical advancement.

Setting the regulatory scene to clarify, and make easier, aspects regarding the storage, sharing and ownership of Big Data would be highly beneficial.

Personalised medicine has huge potential to make treatments more effective while reducing side effects, but it requires access for researchers to Big Data in order for it to advance.

The European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM) believes that the EU should view Big Data as a strategic investment that could take us along the road to improving competitiveness while expanding medical knowledge for the benefit of all stakeholders, notably the patient.

This will be achieved partly through its ability to provide advanced bio-informatics tools. Meanwhile, linking biobanks and overcoming interoperability issues is a must, as is ensuring quality and a workable ethical and legal framework which allows Big Data to be exploited.

Of course, EU lawmakers must balance this against the clear need to protect the individual’s personal information but it must also, crucially, give him or her choices over its use.

Harnessing Big Data is a necessity for all of the reasons outlined above and the time to act is now. Because Big Data is here, and it’s here to stay.

Share this article: