Booz Allen Execs: Health Agencies Should Learn From IC to Harness the Power of Big Data

Booz Allen Hamilton executives wrote in an article published Thursday on The New England Journal of Medicine that federal health care agencies should leverage data science tools and lessons from the intelligence community to optimize big data in order to improve care quality and reduce costs.

Steve Escaravage, a senior vice president in Booz Allen’s digital analytics practice, co-wrote the piece with Kevin Vigilante, an executive VP and a health business leader at the company; and Mike McConnell, a senior executive adviser at Booz Allen.

Some of the technologies and techniques used by the intelligence community that could be adapted by health agencies are data lakes; automated metadata labeling; natural language processing platforms; hypothesis-agnostic data-mining algorithms; cell-level data security; and open-source software.

“Collectively, these techniques and technologies could be used to rapidly integrate and analyze payer, electronic health record, quality-measurement, sociodemographic, environmental, and wearable-sensor data to improve outcomes in a value-based payment environment,” they wrote.

“These massive data sets can be used to perform rapid ‘epidemic intelligence’ to better predict disease outbreaks.”