The Big Data & Health Care Analytics Forum, organized by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and Healthcare IT News, will take place from November 20-21 in Boston. Ahead of the conference, the chief information officer of Boston-based Partners HealthCare, James Noga, spoke about the possibilities of analytics to transform health care in the not-too-distant future.

The main evolution Noga wants to see from health care analytics is a shift from predictive to prescriptive analytics. Predictive analytics allow health centers to allocate personnel and resources by forecasting trends, such as admission rates, based on past experience. But in the future that analysis will have a real-time impact on how hospitals operate and even aid in making better diagnoses.

Noga predicts that the data scientist, a figure that already exists in other industries, will become commonplace in health care, and that the CIO’s role will be to manage and prioritize IT initiatives.

“But the CIO isn’t necessarily the business or clinical owner of the analytic component of big data,” he noted. “I think the CIO has to be the enabler of the underlying infrastructure and obviously participate in the overall strategy, but it’s really our research community and our clinical community and our business planning folks that own it in terms of what questions do we want to answer, what type of analytics do we want to employ.”

The demand for data warehouse architecture, which only a few health care organizations have begun implementing, will rise as the possibilities of analytics become more apparent, and that growing adoption will lead to greater development of health care analytics.