I learnt in a conversation a while ago, that many organisations (for example water Utility companies) have to throw away 90% of the data they collect from sensors. It’s too expensive to maintain and they don’t know what to use it for. This is why ‘data historian’ as a product category has grown, and the market leader here is OSI Soft’s product, PI. In technology terms this is a dinosaur – OSI Soft was set up in 1980 and has always led this market. But over the past 20 years, the growth of data has brought data historian products more into the limelight. My reason for talking about this today is not to tell you about data historian products, but to ask if we need similar products in healthcare and for humans.  You are generating huge amounts of data through your life. And healthcare is only a small part of it. In recent times, this data has both grown exponentially in volume and become explicit. From early childhood, you have interactions with doctors, hospitals and other care providers, and this goes on through your life. These have lived as paper prescriptions and reports for years, and are now largely digitised in many countries. And now, thanks to wearables, and other medical devices, we are living ,breathing data trails generating gigabytes of data on a regular basis. 

An autonomous car generates between 1.5 and 20 TB of data every hour. This is due to high use of audio-visual data. Human data may not (yet) reach those volumes but over the course of your life, you’ll definitely accumulate a few terabytes of data. And the history of this data is highly significant as well, as it’s really your medical and life history. This will only grow, as we move forward as genomic data, microbial data and many other sources into the mix, all connected to you, and your body and health. And the storage, stewardship, and use of this data will all be challenges for us to handle.  It’s worth remembering that most of us don’t have the wherewithal to store and manage our health data. Imagine that you get an email from your local GP to say that they are giving you all your health data back and you can download it (link to zip file enclosed!) and thereafter its yours to use and look after. Where would you keep it? We haven’t even found a way to manage our photographs and videos effectively yet! Not to mention that we currently lack any coherent principles and guidelines for what data to keep, and for how long. And how this data can be accessed and used at a granular level.  The future is exciting. We can see in the crystal ball the emergence of digital twins – not just of our skins, as we’re currently doing at TCS, but of our whole bodies. Twins will provide enormous predictive capabilities that will prevent any number of acute and chronic conditions. We’ll have a care data backbone, which will mirror the EHR and care too will stop being fragmented. Your personal data will be portable, private and defendable. It will not be misused or sold behind your back. Or simply damaged through neglect.  There is a bridge to be built between the challenging present and this exciting future. That’s where innovation comes in.