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. 2016 Nov 21;4(4):e38. doi: 10.2196/medinform.5359

Table 2.

Themes that emerged from the opportunities for big data in health care.

Themes Examples Number of articles
(n)
Articles themes appeared in % of total articles
(N=28)
Improve quality of care Improve efficiency 18 2, 4, 5, 6, 8-13, 18-20, 22-25, 27 64%
Improve outcomes
Reduce waste
Reduce readmissions
Increased productivity and performance
Risk reduction
Process optimization
Managing population health Managing population health 17 2, 5, 8-10, 12-14, 16, 18-20, 23, 25, 26, 28 61%
Early detection of diseases Predicting epidemics 17 2, 4, 5, 7-13, 15, 18-20, 23, 24, 28 61%
Disease monitoring
Health tracking
Adopt and track healthier behaviors
Predicting patient vulnerability
Improved treatments
Data quality, structure, and accessibility Large volumes 16 2, 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 16, 18, 20- 23, 25-28 57%
Wide variety
Creating transparency
High-velocity capture
Access to primary data
Reusable data
Weed out unwanted data
Open source—free access
Improve decision making Evidence-based medicine 11 2,-4, 7, 9, 12, 16, 20, 22, 23, 24 39%
New treatment guidelines
Accuracy in information
Cost reduction Inexpensive 10 1, 3, 4, 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 18 36%
Reducing health care spending
Patient-centric health care Empowering patients 8 2, 3, 5, 12, 14, 20, 22, 24 29%
Patients making informed decisions
Increased communication
Enhancing personalized medicine Targeted approach 6 4-6, 24, 25, 28 24%
Globalization Widely accessible 6 2, 6-8, 10, 20 24%
Global sharing
Leveraging knowledge and practices
Knowledge dissemination
Fraud detection Fraud detection 3 8, 12, 28 11%
Health-threat detection Health-threat detection 1 7 4%