The Big Data in Health Conference was held at Salerno (Italy) on June 6-8, 2018.  The event was organized by Enrico Capobianco, from UMCCS’ Computational Biology & Bioinformatics program,  in collaboration with the Universities of Salerno, Perugia, Roma (Cattolica), and was co-sponsored by Roche Pharma Italy. Follow up publications will appear in Frontiers in Medicine and Journal of Clinical Medicine.

Audience participation  was a mix of clinicians, academicians, researchers in industry, health administrative sector-, and other health professionals, thus confirming the spirit of the initiative aimed to propose an integrative multidisciplinary approach to Big Data in Health, particularly from the Electronic Health Records perspective.

Advances in Precision Medicine, wellbeing and biological age were proposed, together with studies covering a spectrum of complex diseases (cancer, CVD, kydney, AR, epilepsy). Conference presentations are available at the links below.

Big Data in Health are already exerting a profound impact on biomedicine. Examples include:

• The centrality of Electronic Health Records (EHR) in public health and epidemiological studies and in scientific publications
• The foundational role of high-throughput genomics and integrated multiplexed omics to advance experimental biology
• The depth at which high-resolution imaging is achieving unprecedented accuracy

In light of the emerging digital medicine paradigm, the role of digital phenotypes has become crucial to characterize diseases.

Comprehensive approaches are now conceived for the analysis of multi-evidenced data, i.e., data generated from multiple sources, such as cells, organs, individual lifestyle and social habits, environment, population dynamics, etc.

The other emerging N-of-1 paradigm is inspired by individualization of care and cure. Health across wellbeing and disease stages is leveraging through technology the idea of connectedness, thus converging to a dichotomy already in use at the social level, i.e. ‘connected being’ vs ‘disconnected being’.

Through examples of recent and ongoing studies and applications, the main questions addressed at the 2018 Big Data in Health Conference were:

• Is digitalization being disruptive in health?
• Are EHR filling the knowledge clinical gaps in support of patients?
• What are the major bottlenecks and fast tracks for healthy ageing?
• How Big Data can help doctors stop big killers?

Riepilogo degli interventi  |  2018 Big Data in Health Talks