US medical centre chain Carolinas HealthCare has started mining patients’ credit card data to predict health outcomes reports Bloomberg Businessweek.
The idea is that by looking at credit information and purchasing records, doctors can anticipate what ailments their patients will present with.
Carolinas Healthcare’s matching of spending patterns to healthy is an obvious application of Big Data which illustrates some of the benefits that mining information can deliver for individuals and the community.
Should the project overcome patients’ valid privacy concerns, this is the sort of application that is going to be increasingly common as organisations figure out how to apply software to their mountains of information.