Big data and precision medicine: challenges and strategies with healthcare data

Recent snapshots of the European progress on big data in health care and precision medicine reveal diverse perceptions of experts and the public, leading to the impression that algorithmic issues have the largest share among the challenges all health systems are faced with. Yet, from a comparison of different countries it is evident that the adaption and integration of heterogeneous data sources have a major impact on the advancement of precision medicine. Legal regulations for implementation and operation of healthcare networking are actively discussed in the public and gradually implemented in several countries. Based on a unified documentation, they are a perfect precondition for integrating distributed healthcare data to a big data platform with a reliable fact representation. Now, basic and clinical scientists have to be motivated to share their work with these data platforms. In this work, we aim to provide an overview on the common issues in big healthcare data applications and address the challenges for the involved scientific, clinical and administrative partners. We propose a possible strategy for a comprehensive data integration by iterating data harmonization, semantic enrichment and data analysis processes.