Big Data Usage Patterns in the Health Care Domain: A Use Case Driven Approach Applied to the Assessment of Vaccination Benefits and Risks. Contribution of the IMIA Primary Healthcare Working Group.

BACKGROUND: Generally benefits and risks of vaccines can be determined from studies carried out as part of regulatory compliance- followed by surveillance of routine data/ however there are some rarer and more long term events that require new methods. Big data generated by increasingly affordable personalised computing- and from pervasive computing devices is rapidly growing and low cost- high volume- cloud computing makes the processing of these data inexpensive. OBJECTIVE: To describe how big data and related analytical methods might be applied to assess the benefits and risks of vaccines. METHOD: We reviewed the literature on the use of big data to improve health- applied to generic vaccine use cases- that illustrate benefits and risks of vaccination. We defined a use case as the interaction between a user and an information system to achieve a goal. We used flu vaccination and pre-school childhood immunisation as exemplars. RESULTS: We reviewed three big data use cases relevant to assessing vaccine benef