The amount of data in the world is exploding. In particular, the healthcare industry is generating large amounts of data, driven by a wide range of medical and healthcare functions, including clinical records, medical images, genomic data, health behaviors, clinical decision support, disease surveillance, and public health management. The challenges include capturing, storing, searching, sharing, analyzing, and then finding insights from complex, noisy, heterogeneous, longitudinal, and voluminous data.

To take advantage of the massive amounts of data in healthcare fields and provide the right intervention to patients, methods such as personalized care, visualization tools, and predictive models can help benefit all the end users of a healthcare system. Big data analytics needs to bridge data mining and healthcare informatics communities.