Interest in healthcare ‘big data’ grows

February 1, 2014 Leave a comment

January 30, 2014 5:35 pm

Interest in healthcare ‘big data’ grows

By Andrew Ward

When Google announced last year that it was launching a medical venture calledCalico, to do “moonshot thinking around healthcare”, it appeared to mark a departure from the internet group’s core business.

However, the move highlighted growing interest in the potential for data to promote innovation and increase efficiency in the healthcare sector.

“An era of open information healthcare is now under way,” said McKinsey, the consultancy, in a report that predicted “big data” could help cut US healthcare costs by up to $450bn, or 17 per cent.

This forecast was based in large part on the potential to spot trends in electronic patient data that help improve care and tackle inefficiencies.

Google is one of many companies looking to exploit this convergence of data, technology and healthcare.

This month, IMS Health, one of the biggest providers of information services in the sector, filed to launch aninitial public offering in New York, telling prospective investors its data covered 85 per cent of the world’s prescriptions by revenue and 400m anonymous patient records from 100 countries. The company generated revenues of $2.44bn in 2012.

“The big data revolution is in its early days and most of the potential for value creation is still unclaimed,” said McKinsey.

 

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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