ace off's List: RETIREMENT AGEING

• “big data” — a term that refers to the explosion of available information, a byproduct of the digital revolution.
• “Explosion” is not too strong a term, especially in the mental health field.
• The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) has been our control tower for directing big data efforts in biomedical science, but neither the NCBI nor anyone in the private sector has a comprehensive, inexpensive, and secure solution to the problem of data storage.
• “public access” scientific and medical journals, as well as PubMed Central, which was created to make the results of all publications from NIH-funded studies available for free.
• Some of the most innovative vanguard efforts to harness the power of big data are found outside of government and outside of mental health. The Personal Genome Project, Patients Like Me, NextBIO, and some of the projects within Sage Bionetworks are among the current efforts connecting individuals to big data related to their health.
• challenges in the mental health community: lack of a central organization, inconsistent quality of information, and in some cases, a denial of illness. But — as we are seeing in areas as diverse as robotics and baseball — big data has a way of overcoming big challenges. In fact, big data may be the solution for a field that has been lacking in metrics of performance or success.

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