There’s no shortage of great minds using big data techniques to improve the quality of our medical treatments, but sometimes they can’t get access to the data they need most. Improving access to genetic data, for example, might just help cure cancer.

“The health care industry might have embraced the big data movement with open arms, but embracing it with open data probably would be more effective. Hospital organizations, researchers and the tech companies serving them have lots of great ideas — and have achieved some great results, too — but, ultimately, efforts to use big data to transform the industry will only be as good as the data these stakeholders have to work with. “