Opinion: Why is big data so big in healthcare?

Far and away, the industry that pops up the most in discussions of big data is health care. It's not surprising, if you think about it. Lots of disparate sources of data, much of it unstructured. An industry dying to become more cost-effective – or, at least, less wasteful. And an onslaught of new devices designed to automate the process of collecting data, on order to keep professionals from having to be on hand to do so. Recently, there's been an even bigger spate of articles about the intersection of big data and health care. The question is, what's the takeaway for other industries?