Advances in the use of big health data, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, may have the potential to greatly improve patient outcomes and practice management.

But some see the revolution in health informatics as a ‘weapon of math destruction’ that increases inequality.¹

Adjunct Associate Professor Chris Pearce, a health informatics expert at the University of Melbourne and research director at Outcome Health, formerly Melbourne East GP network, is firmly in the former camp.

“It’s coming now,” he says. “So we need to start getting our heads around how we are going to deal with it. In many ways, this is going to be as transformative as the scientific method was in how we do things.”