Abstract
Recent advances in the collection and processing of health data from multiple sources at scale—known as big data—have become appealing across public health domains. However, present discussions often do not thoroughly consider the implications of big data or health informatics in the context of continuing health disparities. The 2 key objectives of this paper were as follows: first, it introduced 2 main problems of health big data in the context of health disparities—data absenteeism (lack of representation from underprivileged groups) and data chauvinism (faith in the size of data without considerations for quality and contexts). Second, this paper suggested that health organizations should strive to go beyond the current fad and seek to understand and coordinate efforts across the surrounding societal-, organizational-, individual-, and data-level contexts in a realistic manner to leverage big data to address health disparities.
Highlights
The emergence of big data platforms is showing promise in addressing many public health problems, such as predicting and managing the spread of global infectious diseases by drawing on real-time data on social media [1,2], empowering people to monitor their health through wearable technologies and interact with health care providers through patient portals [3,4]
This is because health organizations that want to incorporate the use of big data in their work with underprivileged groups may arguably face additional challenges beyond computational complexities
Recognizing the twin perils of data absenteeism and data chauvinism in the context of big data use for health disparities research, what steps could organizations take to address them considering that many are moving toward the integration of big data solutions into their system? There are no obvious and easy solutions, but we suggest that health organizations should strive to go beyond solely cultivating computational competency and consider societal, organizational, individual, and data-level contexts when implementing big data research and solutions to address health disparities to avoid the pitfalls of data absenteeism and data chauvinism
Summary
The emergence of big data platforms is showing promise in addressing many public health problems, such as predicting and managing the spread of global infectious diseases by drawing on real-time data on social media [1,2], empowering people to monitor their health through wearable technologies and interact with health care providers through patient portals [3,4]. This is critical to the success of deploying big data solutions to improve the health of underprivileged groups, as they may not have the resources to access some of the communication https://www.jmir.org/2020/1/e16377
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