NIH Launches $96M Initiative for Big Data Centers of Excellence

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has launched a new initiative to fund the exploration of using Big Data to improve national health care outcomes. NIH will provide $24 million per year for four years to establish six to eight Big Data Centers of Excellence. The centers will be used by researchers and students for training in data science and testing the use of large and complex datasets to create tools, methods, and software that can improve health care processes.

Big Data has strong potential to revolutionize the health care industry, not just through the development of new processes and products, but also by establishing new standards for health care policy development and implementation. Global health expert Joel Selanikio recently discussed this issue in a TEDx talk. But while Big Data might have the potential for solving structural challenges in the health care system, the U.S. scientific community is ill-equipped to take advantage of the opportunity.

NIH cites a growing resource and skills gap between biomedical researchers and the new forms of data collection and integration that are reshaping the health care field as the reason for funding the centers. To address the issue, Big Data Centers also will host researchers from outside of traditional biomedical research fields that are trained in data science. NIH seeks to promote interdisciplinary, collaborative research that can translate data into knowledge that will advance medical discoveries and improve health care outcomes and processes.

Centers will operate as a consortium and products developed through the institute will be shared and distributed broadly to the national research community. An information webinar for prospective applicants is being held on Thursday, September 12 from 3:00-5:00PM ET. Applications will be due on November 20th of this year. The Big Data to Knowledge Center of Excellence is the first of several funding opportunities for Big Data research that will be initiated by the federal government in the coming months.