Health is not the only space being driven by information. It has received the lion’s share of exposure, however we should not forget the rest of the spaces, government, military, financial, industry, and technology. The amount of recorded data multiplies almost exponentially for each industry, much like a nuclear fission reaction., and there is significant fallout.
Our ability to understand and incorporate into a useful knowledge base overwhelms our capacity to understand the information to frame it into useful form.
The federal government IT efforts, and others have and are continuing to build software to extract and display this deta into images understandable at first glance. Without this the data is useless.
The same limitations apply to medicine, and medical research. Who has not read a journal article that quotes ad nauseum statistics which only a statistician can interpret? How many of us skip to the conclusions to ferret out what the article is all about? That’s me!!
The web site data.gov is a not so secret open source for information ranging from The Open Government Initiative to an almost infinite number of data sets, including open data sets from all the major US Government Departments
The best way to find out what is in there is to explore the site. It is pretty amazing !