The use of big data in healthcare in Brazil: perspectives for the near future

The use of big data has increased in recent years in all scientific areas. There are currently three promising areas for the use of big data in healthcare: precision medicine, electronic medical records and the internet of things. Two programming languages have gained momentum in data science: R and Python. Regarding the statistical techniques, it is expected that machine learning (especially classification and regression trees), methodologies for controlling spurious associations (such as Bonferroni correction and false discovery rate) and methodologies for dimension reduction (such as principal components analysis and propensity scores) will be increasingly used. Privacy is an issue that will become ever more important in data analysis. The use of big data in healthcare will bring enormous gains in terms of costs, time and lives saved, and needs to be actively defended by data scientists and epidemiologists.