Summary
Paul Taylor, PhD, Reader at the Institute of Health Informatics University College London, discusses the use of real-world medical data in health research, including how health care data differs from other big data, how researchers can access health data, implications of data ownership and consent, types of data used in medical research, methodological challenges working with large-scale medical data, integration of health data with traditional randomized trials, examples of recent big health data research, patient privacy concerns, and new big data sources for medical research.