Electronic Health Record Data Mining — Is It a Dirty Word? Read more: http://www.ihealthbeat.org/perspectives/2013/electronic-health-record-data-mining-is-it-a-dirty-word.aspx#ixzz2L7j6rhyW

John Sharp:

With the broader availability of data from electronic health records, the secondary use of this rich clinical data presents the opportunity for data mining. However, data mining has received negative press when used by pharmaceutical companies to monitor physician prescribing patterns.

In many industries, mining of Big Data has become a profitable source for business intelligence. Everything from financial trends to social media sentiment analysis is game. With the ability to search personal data through new tools like Facebook’s Graph Search and increasingly targeted marketing based on huge databases of personal data, the concept of data mining is becoming synonymous with invading privacy.

In health care, the expanding use of EHRs creates opportunities for secondary use of health data collected at the point of care. Such data are unique in that they enable data mining of real-world clinical practice on millions of patients in large health systems. Unlike data collected in the carefully structured setting of a clinical trial, large groups of patients can be studied retrospectively as were treated for a variety of conditions.

Brands Can Speak For Themselves Now, Very Powerfully

Dan Frommer:

Tesla CEO Elon Musk shreds* the New York Times review of his Model S, using data to argue the writer is telling the wrong story.

I won’t pretend to know who’s actually right or wrong here — Tesla certainly only has an interest in telling its side of the story — but the fact that a company has the tools and distribution to quickly publish something like this today is pretty amazing. (See also, OXO’s wonderful takedown of rival Quirky.)

Even a few years ago, something like this probably would have required finding a rival newspaper — the Wall Street Journal, perhaps — to collaborate on a takedown. Or maybe an expensive full-page ad campaign in the top five papers, which would have looked defensive and seemed less convincing.

But now that every smart company has a regularly updated blog, Elon Musk has 136,000 Twitter followers, etc., brands can speak for themselves very powerfully. And if the tone is right, they don’t even look lame: Tesla actually looks pretty great right now*. The balance of power has shifted.