2023: Another year of technology and Big Data?

The transformative role of technology and data in healthcare is well established, but 2023 promises to take it several steps further. Research, for example, is ready to enter the accelerator after a taste of the future with its important role in the pandemic.

That promise primarily hinges on the dramatic advance of real world and routinely collected data sets, as well as the lessons learnt from rapidly conducted clinical studies in response to covid-19 and monkeypox. These developments will help meet the needs of policymakers who generally make decisions faster than evidence can be accumulated to fully advise them. Speed with rigour also meets the demands of funders who want immediate implementation of their research projects.

Accelerating these processes without materially compromising the quality of evidence will ultimately benefit patients and the public. But tests of interventions can easily become suboptimal in their construction, execution, and reporting. ¹ Research isn’t perfect and real life is less perfect still; any benefits identified by research are hard to translate into clinical practice or health policy.

One important innovation is trusted research environments which help the public feel more confident about the privacy of their personal health data ² and can be designed to prevent exploitation of personal data by commercial enterprises. Once concerns over privacy are addressed, the value of these large data sets isn’t hard to establish.

Experimentation is certainly required. A new research paper examines the potential of patient health records to estimate excess deaths in a pandemic, and finds that this is entirely feasible. ³ As crisis after crisis sweeps the globe, new applications of technology and new ways to use available data are central to preventing and responding to health crises — such as the one Lebanon finds itself gripped by. ⁴