Big Data and Healthcare: An Interview With Rod Smith

I know a thing or two about data, especially the big kind that is so popular today. Far too many people, however, still think of data as rows as columns in a spreadsheet.

Sure, that type of structured data is important. Big Data doesn't change any of that. The power of unstructured data is hard to dismiss, especially given the proliferation of powerful text-, photo-, and video-mining tools being developed.

I'm hard-pressed to think of an industry that could benefit more from mining unstructured data than health care. The power of this type of information is a major emphasis in Too Big to Ignore. Along those lines, I recently sat down with Rod Smith of IBM. In his role, Smith serves as the VP of Internet Emerging Technologies to talk about how Seton Health Care used the unstructured data on patient records in fascinating ways. We also discuss how to get doctors on board with emerging technologies.

Watch the video here.

I wrote this post as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program

This post also ran on Huffington Post.