Concept

All developed countries face a common series of problems in healthcare. These include supporting the health care needs of an older population; managing multi-morbidity, and in general, the integrated care of people with chronic disease; limiting the rise in health care costs; and integrating health and social care. Big data has played a limited role in the health sector, when compared with its role in other areas. There are several reasons for this: the data are heterogeneous, and in individual silos; the data are complex, and collected in different ways, and using different techniques; there are real data protection and data governance issues to overcome; no tools exist to make these data accessible to end-users, nor to support the necessary complex analytics for non-experts. MIDAS intends to have a real impact on these problems, and to release some of the potential of Big Data to improve health, and health care delivery. The concept then is to work with key innovators in healthcare big data inside healthcare organisations in Europe to make available to them the technology and the policy governance and to make the learning outcomes form that available at European level for uptake by other healthcare organisations.

Key challenges facing healthcare organisations that will be addressed by the MIDAS Project include: