Mobile Meetings Series: “Empowering patients: big data sets for better health”

The growing Internet of Things (IoT) is already generating a huge amount of data. The availability and confluence of rich data sets from multiple systems, organisations and verticals is creating a massive opportunity to now truly harness the power of Big Data.

Health is one notable area where this has the potential to translate into significant benefits to citizens, governments and businesses. For example, combining environmental data and movement patterns with health information could deliver new insights on triggers and patterns of different conditions or diseases. This could be used by health institutions to better predict occurrences and plan preventative measures. It could also help in providing better advice to patients or individuals at risk, or for healthcare companies to have better insights on how environmental factors impact treatment. The opportunities are vast and wide.

For these benefits to be fully realised and to accelerate the opportunity there are, however, several existing challenges. The recently published DG SANTE study on Big Data in Public Health, Telemedicine and Healthcare highlights many of these and makes several clear policy recommendations.

As such, this Mobile Meeting series breakfast is therefore an opportune moment to focus on:

·       How to raise awareness of the added value of Big Data in Health and create trust with users and the general public?
·       How can the quality and safety of existing and new data sources be secured without stifling innovation?
·       What role can mobile operators play to help facilitate Big Data applications for Health?
·       How can European Policy makers better leverage the use of big data in health to drive the mobile economy and complete the digital single market?

Event summary