Hong Kong to soon release a new big data platform to peruse medical record!

Hong Kong’s health officers have begun to work on a big data platform which will ultimately permit researchers to analyse medical records. Scholars hope that this platform will help them get over additional hurdles, right now officials have many questions popping up- what data to open up? and where users will access it?

This plan was transpired when Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor made an announcement in her October policy address that the Hospital Authority, which manages the city’s public hospitals, would develop a big data system. The motif behind this idea is to help access information quickly and detect useful patterns in the records to help form policy and soothe medical research.

“The Hospital Authority’s data will be made available to academia,” Dr Cheung Ngai-tseung, authority’s head of information technology and health informatics said. “The massive amount of data could facilitate machine learning.”

Dr Cheung added that big data and machine learning has previously been used in healthcare like anticipating how likely a patient is to develop a specific condition in the future. He mentioned that, details are not much known about the new platform.

Paul Yip Siu-fai, chair professor of population health at the University of Hong Kong said that it is inappropriate for researchers to visit a particular site to access data and suggested that information will be available after a researcher signs a declaration of not going deep into patients’ personal identities.