Interview with Paul Wallace
Paul Wallace, who has just taken on the role of director at the Center for Comparative Effectiveness Research at the Lewin Group, talked with Indu Subaiya about how patients are generating data like never before. Dr. Wallace most recently was medical director for health and productivity management programs at Kaiser Permanente’s national Permanente Federation. He served as a physician and administrator with Kaiser for more than 20 years and is now interested in the ways researchers have shifted from hunter gatherers of data to become data farmers.
Wallace is a familiar face on the Health 2.0 conference stage. This fall, he’ll be a member of our Big Data in Health Care Panel discussing the ways we are increasingly able to bring together more types of data from disparate sources — allowing us new perspectives on heath care issues both across the country and in our communities.
In this interview you’ll hear Wallace explain his take on this fairly new term that everyone seems to define differently. Big Data offers the promises of the large sample analysis that has always been difficult to preform because drawing on different sources often left researchers with data in various settings and formats. But experts are focusing on merging and integrating resources as they contribute to ever growing publicly available data pools. Other suppliers to data collection also include patients who produce information just by receiving care.
Wallace believes we have a lot to gain from applying what we learn from Big Data, saying that it will benefit health care on three levels: policymakers can look at what works; practice managers can determine how to apply working models; and patients will be provided with information they can relate to and use. Listen to the following interview to learn more about how this growing trend will affect medicine, traditional patient-doctor roles and what is already possible.
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