Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commissioner Julie Brill has voiced concerns about the way consumer apps collect and use health data. She raised the issue during a round-table discussion at The Hill’s Tech in Policy event in Washington DC this week. Brill remarked that the collection and use of data ought

Doctors in the Carolinas Health System are making patient care a little more personal. The system, which includes more than 900 hospitals, nursing homes, doctors’ offices, and surgical centers in North and South Carolina, have begun using consumer data on 2 million people to identify high-risk patients, and take a

Swansea University have added the brand new MSc in Health Data Science to their curriculum, the first of its kind in the UK. The Health Data Science masters is aimed at healthcare professionals, computer scientists with experience in healthcare and biomedical engineers. According to the University of Swansea’s website, “Health

In collaboration with a small group of other companies, Modernizing Medicine, a company developing electronic medical record systems out of Boca Raton, Florida, is working on an app supported by IBM’s Watson. The new program will be an enhanced version of their Electronic Medical Assistant (EMA), already in use in

In a recent speech, Google CEO Larry Page claimed that big data analysis such as Google Flu Trends would be able to save up to 100,000 lives each year. This promising outlook has now been put into question by a study conducted by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. John

A new challenge to combat Alzheimer’s disease was announced last week by the Global CEO Initiative on Alzheimer’s Disease (CEOi), Sage Bionetworks and DREAM Project. The challenge aims to bring together experts in big data and science to fight against Alzheimer’s disease – of which more than 40 million people

In an attempt similar to Google Flu Trends, The Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention will be working with online search giant Baidu to use its large user database to help forecast flu outbreaks. The deputy director of the Centre, Gao Fu, suggested that the prediction tool may be

Researchers at the University of Leeds have pioneered a data mining system for individualising blood cancer treatment, which could revolutionise all cancer care. The blood cancer research was focused around non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which affects 10,000 people in the UK annually, making it the sixth most common cancer. The system, funded by the

Celmatix, a US-based startup, are beginning clinical trials for their Big Data technology in the field of fertility treatment. Their technology Polaris, so-named for the guiding star in astronomy, computes massive amounts of data to better predict which fertility treatments a particular patient will respond to best. Polaris will initially

We met up with Vesna Prčkovska, Co Founder of Mint Labs. Mint Labs develops visualization and image manipulation software for the virtual dissection of white matter structures of the brain. The company provides imaging marker quantification for longitudinal studies, across population and across time. Who are you? My name is Vesna Prčkovska