There is a possibility we could improve overall healthcare in the country while reducing costs and speeding services if hospitals joined together with insurance companies to provide centralized, secure access to patient information. Now THAT would be big data. Imagine the ability to sift through clinical data from every hospital in the U.S. to look for trends in healthcare. It would be much easier to share important test results between doctors and specialists when required. Patients would benefit by having their entire medical histories readily available in an emergency. There are thousands of examples of the benefits of moving patient data to the cloud.