Pharmacy Practice, Education, and Research in the Era of Big Data: 2014-15 Argus Commission Report

Abstract

INTRODUCTION The American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy Commission is comprised of AACP's five immediate past presidents and is annually charged by the current President examine one or more strategic questions related pharmacy education. The term Argus refers a character from Greek mythology purported have 100 eyes and be all seeing. (1) President Patricia Chase charged the 2014-15 Commission with an analysis of how the use of or bioinformatics sciences using large and diverse sources, might affect pharmacy education. The Commission met in person in October 2014 and divided the analysis into the distinct study of big and the primary missions of academic pharmacy: education and specifically the assessment of and learning, patient care practice at the individual and population levels, and research and graduate education. The work was framed by the science plenary keynote by Atul Butte, (2) MD, PhD from Stanford University, presented at the 2014 AACP Annual Meeting, and also included key informant interviews and literature searches. It became clear through these analyses that the availability over the last decade or longer of large databases and super computer computational power has influenced research programs across many of the areas of scholarship in the pharmaceutical and translational sciences (e.g., computational biology, high throughput drug screening, pharmacogenomics and other --omic sciences). Education and practice have, for the most part, only begun be affected by the big revolution. BIG DATA: WHAT IS IT? In the book, Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think (3), Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier note that is no rigorous definition of big data. They continue frame how they approach the topic in their acclaimed book noting that: refers things one can do at a large scale that cannot be done at a smaller one, extract new insights or create new forms of value, in ways that change markets, organizations, the relationships between citizens and governments, and more. They continue that this era will require society to shed its obsession with causality in exchange for simple correlations: not knowing why but only what. They liken the impact of this era as no less than how the telescope and microscope changed our comprehension of the universe and appreciation of the presence of germs, respectively. Perhaps, data should be referred as our datascope. The authors continue their clarification by noting that the characterization by some of big being artificial intelligence is inaccurate. Rather than teaching computers think like a human, the analysis of huge sets allow people infer probabilities and make predictions. They identify the future potential of the use of big diagnose illness and identify treatments, certainly activities that resonate in the realms of pharmacy and health care. The journal Health Affairs published a themed issue on big in July 2014, and Roski, Bo-Linn, and Andrews (4) described three defining features of this phenomenon as the three V's: volume, variety, and velocity. Volume relates the availability of massive amounts of which requires flexible and easily expanded storage, retrieval, and management systems. Variety refers the fact that come in many formats. In health care this is structured and free-text (e.g., insurance claims, electronic health records (EHRs), diagnostic images, genomic information, social media, personal fitness device streams.) Velocity refers the characteristic of the big infrastructure that makes it possible manage more flexibly and quickly. The authors distinguish the use of from a single large dataset such as Medicare claims data, which they would not characterize as big analysis, from the combination and analysis of from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, from electronic health records (EHRs), and sources of additional such as a population's fitness or nutrition information for which the authors believe there will be significant advances in health care in the near future. …