Big Data and Health Economics: Opportunities, Challenges and Risks

Big Data offers opportunities in many fields. Healthcare is not an exception. In this paper we summarize the possibilities of Big Data and Big Data technologies to offer useful information to policy makers. In a world with tight public budgets and ageing populations we feel necessary to save costs in any production process. The use of outcomes from Big Data could be in the future a way to improve decisions at a lower cost than today. In addition to list the advantages of properly using data and technologies from Big Data, we also show some challenges and risks that analysts could face. We also present an hypothetical example of the use of administrative records with health information both for diagnoses and patients.