clinical information is unstructured in
clinical notes,” he says.
Mining the mountain of unstructured
data takes a lot of computational power.
Cloud platforms, Riskin says, are ideally
suited for the task.
“Analytics requires processing power
and expertise, and cloud computing is
proving in health care and other markets
that it can deliver faster and cheaper
than internal resources,” he says. “What
we and other start-ups in this space are
doing is bypassing the manual processes
of data collection and standardization
that take such an enormous amount of
time and resources to perform.”
In Riskin’s mind, new health I. T. start-
ups, many of which are using cloud
computing platforms, are the ones that
can work with the data holders in the
market—the hospitals, practices and
health information exchanges among
them—and find ways to embed new
knowledge into care processes.
ply isn’t going to happen if health systems and hospitals are trying to use internal resources to mine their Big Data.
Cloud computing platforms enable processing power to be spun up, and adjust-
“Cloud computing is proving it
can deliver faster and cheaper
than internal resources.”
—Dan Riskin
“What the country bet on, and is pay-
ing for, is that if the industry can digitize
its information, it could make it rapidly
useful for those innovative approaches
to improve care.” Riskin says. “That sim-
ments to be made on the fly. “When I
think about the power and flexibility of
cloud computing, I’m frankly shocked
that we’re still having multi-million dol-
lar, on-site installs.”
