Big data are coming to psychiatry: a general introduction.

Digital data are collected at an incredible rate. With 2.5 quintillion (2.5 × 10^18) bytes of data generated every day, 90 % of the world’s data were created in the past 2 years (IBM 2015). This is due in part to the revolutionary belief that data and the unexpected information it contains are valuable (Economist 2010; MIT Sloan and IBM 2010; Hill 2013). Data as a critically important source of knowledge, insights and value are transforming every aspect of our world, including healthcare. There are now many successful standalone businesses that sell data, analytic tools and data analysis (ATKearney 2013). The market that is currently referred to as big data, including hardware, software and services was estimated at about $19 billion in 2013 (Kelly 2014). Healthcare is one of the fastest growing segments of the digital world, with healthcare data increasing at a rate of about 50 % per year (IDC 2014). There are three primary sources of big data in healthcare: providers and payers (including EMR, imaging, insurance claims and pharmacy data), omic data (including genomic, epigenomic, proteomic, and metabolomic data) (Starren et al. 2013), and patients and non-providers (including data from smart phone and Internet activities, sensors and monitoring tools) (Glenn and Monteith 2014). The growth of big data in psychiatry will provide unprecedented opportunities for exploration, descriptive observation, hypothesis generation, and prediction for clinical, research and business issues. The results of big data analyses will be incorporated into standards and guidelines and will directly impact clinical decision making. Psychiatrists will increasingly have to evaluate results from research studies and commercial analytical products that are based on big data. In addition to the opportunities, multiple challenges remain relating to data quality, acquisition and processing, analytical methodology and interpretation. The purpose of this article is to discuss some of the fundamental features of big data that will be a part of psychiatry in the near future. The wide variety of ethical issues related to big data in society including individual privacy, informed consent, reuse of data, involvement of commercial organizations, and attitudes towards the boundaries between public and private are outside the scope of this article.