Background: Big Data and Open Data are concepts that have evolved over the years and have different applications in health, from facilitating surveillance and preventing disease to fostering behavioral changes. Objectives: This exploratory study has two objectives: 1) To provide understanding about the use of Big Data and Open Data in the health arena and 2) to characterize the discussion, social behavior, interest and information shared in social networks and other online sources about Big Data and Open Data in health. Methods: Keywords related to “Health Big Data” and “Health Open Data” were used to gather data from social networks and from scientific databases. A qualitative based analysis was conducted upon a randomly selected subset of tweets, a list of comments in selected Facebook posts, a group of Instagram photographs and a list of selected LinkedIn posts. Trends in searches and publications were determined for Google Trends and the three scientific paper databases. Results: Majority of tweets are apps, the Cloud, consumers, costs, hackers, homecare, interoperability, mining, mobile, monitoring, openness, physicians, privacy, quality, research, safety, sensors, social media, startups, storage and wearables. Comments in selected Facebook posts showed mistrust toward any social network site involved in health. Users blamed companies for health security problems. On Instagram highly visual graphs and charts are the most common types of posts, followed by photographs of events related to data and health. LinkedIn posts including both Big Data and health count for more than 50,000 for “all time periods” and more than 3,000 for a period of “one week to one month”. The most common topics for the first 20 results sorted by relevance were: partnerships, use of Big Data in health, health Big Data analytics, and Big Data trends. Google Trends showed that searches including health Big Data and health Open Data have increased steadily since 2012. For the three scientific paper databases, there seemed to be a greater increase in publications regarding Big Data than for Open Data. Conclusions: An integrated analysis of social tools and scientific databases can provide valuable insights into people’s perceptions on innovative applications in health. Our results suggest that while interest in Big Data is increasing rapidly, there are growing concerns about data leakage and the ability of providers and governments to assure privacy. For Open Data in health, the increase in interest is not as large as that of Big Data in health.

Big Data, Open Data, Open Governmental Data, Social Media, Qualitative Research