Dr Lonny Reisman Discusses Big Data's Untapped Potential

Academic work has the potential to demonstrate positive outcomes for patients, but practically speaking, Lonny Reisman, MD, CEO of HealthReveal, said physicians simply don’t have the time to read, comprehend and apply the data when they are seeing and treating patients continuously all day.

Transcript (slightly modified

With all the data being presented to physicians, how are they handling it all?

I think there’s a tremendous amount of work being published. It’s all good work and I’ll speak personally, it’s impossible for me to keep up with it and I probably have more time to read than most.

So if you think about the practitioner who is seeing patients 10to 12 hours a day for 15 minutes, the ability to relate what they’ve read, if they’ve read it, 3 or 4 weeks ago or months ago, sitting with them at a moment in time where they’ve got 7 minutes, but that patient in fact exhibits the profile that was articulated in the literature that they’ve read, the sort of ability to bridge that literature to that patient at a moment in time has got to be very, very challenging.

And what I believe is that we can create a technological bridge between the physiologic parameters that represent that patient and the literature with an ability to articulate to the physician, patient, care manager, what needs to be done at a moment in time when the patient is either sitting in front of the doctor or even at home were based on a change in activity or blood pressure, or heart rate, or glycemic control, there’s an opportunity to intervene.

So I think we need to think less about particular settings, particular events, bad outcomes, and look for physiologic changes that might be antecedent to these events, which are impact-able by applying what we know from the clinical literature.