A recurring theme in this space is the transformative power of free flowing data.

Our industry, highly information intensive, has been locked into the two dimensions of a sheet of paper since forever.  The industry wide transition that is happening is being pushed, pulled and dragged by many forces, but none is more powerful than all of the work to make our data liquid, to digitize it and then let it flow.  When that happens, change happens.  And though there remains much disagreement about the nature or direction of the needed changes, most agree that change is needed.

So the story this week about Aetna, Humana, Kaiser, and United coming together to make pool 5 billion de-identified claims over the past 12 years into a single database and then give anyone who wants it access to that monster was welcome news to us.

Consistently, we'll always favor market driven innovation over grand plans divined in some governmental sausage making process.  Access to this type of big data is exactly the oxygen needed by the innovative process.  We've seen for years the value that has been created from using the public Medicare data, and now we will have a comparable data set that does not have the demographic skew inherent in the Medicare bits and bytes.

Kuddos to the big four for taking the step.

Now, change agents, dive in and start figuring out what really matters and what really works.