How about a Splunk for healthcare data?

I blogged about Splunk earlier today.

Splunk automatically organizes various types of IT data (logs, configuration files, message queues, JMX, SNMP and database transactions) into events. It then classifies these events and discovers relationships between events of different kinds. Events are indexed by time, terms and relationships. It then tosses on a search engine so you can look for patterns in realtime or much later.

Now, healthcare IT builds on top of regular IT so Splunk is a fascinating product for HCIT purposes and you should look at putting it to use as is. It’s bound to save you time and support costs.

However, what if we took the same concepts in Splunk and applied them to fast-moving medical information? Could we do event-based tracking of unstructure clinical trends data? Could we take what Splunk does and feed it HL7 or X12 data and get meaningful results?

Definitely worth some consideration.