In medicine, our ability to generate data stands in constant opposition to our capacity to understand it. We spend billions developing drugs, but don’t fully understand the ailments they treat, we respond to illness quickly, but often fail to measure outcomes over time, we rely on doctors to treat patients, but don’t give them the information they need to do so. We operate healthcare partially blind.

To learn what works in medicine, we measure, reflect and improve – Doctors inherently do this because their goal is to make us feel better. However, to make medicine faster, we only classify, simplify and organize but never seek to understand – the health system does this inherently because its goal is administrative efficiency.

Now, in spite of our ability to generate massive amounts of data about our health, up to 80% of all healthcare data remains shrouded in darkness, inaccessible to patients, providers, and researchers, alike. When we ignore this “Dark Data”, medical practice suffers, blinded to the meaningful context that is required in order to learn what treatments work best, for whom, when, and why.

To transform healthcare, we must add light to the 80% of healthcare data that is currently dark.