Yes, it is a mouthful. However, it is one of the best tools to get a handle on reducing the cost of health care in the U.S. Imagine, in 10 years, your health care provider will have nearly 1.5 million clinical decisions they could make about your health when figuring out what ails you.

Meanwhile, the activities of university researchers, federal researchers and private enterprises will continue to pour new information, techniques, technologies, and pharmaceuticals into the medical domain to the tune of 7.3 giga tetraoctets1! What is a giga tetraoctet you ask?

Well, right now, the global output of digital data estimated by the International Data Corporation is more than 1.2 zettabytes! Right. And what is a zettabyte? Well, consider the amount of data generated if everyone on Earth Twittered for an entire century, and it was compressed into one year -- that would equal one zettabyte. So what does the number 7.3 giga tetraoctets look like? How about this: 4,774,784,000,000,000,000 bytes or 4,774 zettabytes. And guess what -- they even have a name for that big number: “Yattabytes”, or as we would call it-- a lottabytes! And just as an aside, the National Security Agency, our friendly spy in the sky, is currently building a data center in the Utah desert that they project will be storing yattabytes of surveillance data -- that's a whole lot of images!

So pity the poor health providers that have to deal with all this data! That's where predictive analytics comes in! Not only can it “mine” the data for useful information, but it can “model” it for analysis. The promise of health care predictive analytics cannot be underestimated.

The result is a wealth of new, evidence-based clinical options for providers. You too will have a wealth of information sources to assist you in making decisions about your health. Equally important, you will have continual access to all your health information no matter when or where you are in the world, enabling health care organizations down to the solo provider to insure a continuity of care throughout your life. Providers and health care administrators will also benefit by discovering and resolving inefficiencies in their organizations and practices giving them an important tool in managing health care costs. And those are just a few of the benefits health care predictive analytics promises to deliver.

Remember WATSON, the super computer that played Jeopardy last year? Well IBM is exploring using WATSON and another data mining and modeling process called neural networking to assist in analyzing this avalanche of new and existing health care data.

The future will involve empowering you with much more control over maintaining your health, and creating a seamless health care experience that will keep both you and your health care providers operating at peak performance.

There's a fairly new startup in Bayside, called Redwood Medical Consulting, that is exploring these possibilities as well as currently offering health care providers EHR or practice management solutions ranging from free to modestly priced systems. And almost as if designed as a “practice run,” as of Jan. 1, 2012, providers will have to use a new and enlarged set of numbers, called “HIPAA Transaction Codes 5010.” They already are using a smaller set of codes, called: “HIPAA Transaction Codes 4010,” but there are 850-plus new codes that they will be required to use.

Redwood Medical Consulting is also preparing a series of seminars to assist health care providers cope with another, new and very big set of numbers: the codes used to describe your encounter with that provider to the insurance company, Medicare, etc. -- whoever is reimbursing that provider for his or her services. Right now there are about 18,000 codes called ICD-9 or “International Classification of Diseases No. 9.” As of Oct. 1, 2013, a new set of code numbers called ICD-10 will replace ICD-9 and the number of codes jumps to 170,000! And providers will be required to add a lot more information to the “SOAP” or CHART note they create after your visit so the billing department knows which of the new codes to use when submitting a claim for reimbursement.

There are a lot of big changes, big numbers and big challenges for health care providers to cope with in the near future. Although the changes promise improved healthcare safety, affordability and accessibility, to name a few, the changes also mean being “able to leap tall buildings in a single bound” ... a caped crusader once said.

Erin Stevenson is a member of the Redwood Technology Consortium and senior consultant at Redwood Medical Consulting. His email is