Running with the Big Data Bulls…

Let’s say you are all booked with your luxury tour package in Irunea/Pamplona for the San Fermin Festival. You are so excited because you will be able to scratch off one item on your bucket list, the Encierro…the running of the bulls. You make your way down and find a great spot, right where the locals said would be a great location to catch all of the action. However, you are very sleepy from a night of partying like a rockstar and doze off next to a fire hydrant on the street. You hear two rockets launch and the bulls all charge toward you. There are tens of thousands of people stampeding you as well.

Ok, it was a bad dream! But, if this was more realistic for you and you sustained injuries during this event, it would be an ICD-10 code of W52.04;

“crushed by a human stampede while resting or sleeping”.

On October 1st, the healthcare system switches from ICD-9 to ICD-10. ICD-10 is the 10th revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems.

Who cares, right? ….. We all should! We should care because claim denials could double as providers and payers get used to the new, more specific codes.

So, what does this have to do with Big Data, you may ask? For example, under the new system, cardiologist will have not one but 845 codes for angioplasty. Dermatologists will need to specify which of eight kinds of acne a patient has. Gastroenterologists who don’t know what’s causing a patient’s stomachache will be asked to specify where the pain is and what other symptoms are present – gas? Eructation (belching)? –

“since there is a separate code for each" 

According to the Wall Street Journal article “70,000 Ways to Classify Ailments” by Melinda Beck. 

There are billions of dollars invested in the education and training of these conversion codes already and it has been postponed several times before. However, we are only days away and it appears to still be on track to GO-LIVE. There are also benefits to the new coding system such as being able to better identify health problems, manage diseases and determine outcomes more accurately. This database will continue to grow and create a very detailed deluge of data about all of us as patients and change healthcare over all.

ICD-10 will transform the way business is done in the healthcare industry and provide more big data for our physicians and Chief Medical Officers to crunch. Please be informed!

In the spirit of keeping my fellow Data Protection cohorts informed, please

‘Follow’ me on Twitter and for more creative content on Backup & Recovery please listen to my podcast Data Protection Gumbo.

Here are some other recent posts I have written on LinkedIn:

• Wake Up & Smell the Big Data!
• The Medical Big Data Race is on…
• Straight Outta Transcendence
• Hungry for Knowledge: Try Data Protection Gumbo
• Data Protection Man v Big Data Billionaires: Passion Ignites Storage

Demetrius Malbrough is an expert in solving Data Protection challenges for small, medium and enterprise companies. He holds multiple Backup and Recovery certifications with major software leaders represented in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Backup / Recovery Software. Demetrius is passionate about providing solutions to help companies meet demanding data protection objectives in the face of data’s changing paradigm in the Copy Data Management market.