Table 1 Big Data: Israel’s strengths and weaknesses
From: Big Data in Israeli healthcare: hopes and challenges report of an international workshop
| Strengths |
| 1. Strong high tech industry; out-of-box thinking |
| 2. Expertise in natural language systems |
| 3. Health plan databases |
| a. All Israeli residents are members of a health plan |
| b. Large number of members in each plan |
| c. Unique patient IDs |
| d. Diverse population |
| e. The rate of transferring among plans is very low |
| f. Health plans have many years of longitudinal data |
| g. All primary care physicians and most other providers have electronic health records |
| h. Health plans integrate high quality data from a large number of providers (including direct care professionals, labs, pharmacies, etc.) and do so almost in real time |
| i. Growing national HIE system, integrating all health plans and all hospitals |
| 4. Health plans know how to use their databases for care improvement |
| 5. Health plans have a strong motivation to make care more efficient |
| 6. Limited number of health care system actors and less fragmentation; makes coordination easier |
| Weaknesses |
| 1. Storage and computational capacity in the health plans is large, but not as large as in Google, IBM, etc. |
| 2. Lack of guidelines on what health data may be put on the cloud |
| 3. Relative long negotiation times for high tech-health plan collaborations |
| 4. Lack of clarity regarding who owns the data |
| 5. Shortage of funds for evaluation studies |
| 6. Not getting enough input from patients on the Big Data initiatives |
| 7. Professionals and organizations who are very protective of their data |
| 8. Insufficient awareness of the potential of Big Data to improve care and make it more efficient |
| 9. Health plans viewing their data as an asset to be monetized |
| 10. Health plan data systems very focused on clinical data; only now beginning to pull in data on patient experience, patient preferences and patient-reported outcomes |
| 11. Slow-moving IRB processes |