On 13 March 2019, the Karaganda Medical University held a workshop “Big data in healthcare”.

Issues and opportunities of using large data sets in healthcare were the focus of the workshop held with the participation of international and domestic experts. Currently, there are not well-developed methods in the region to work with health big data. Therefore, the workshop attracted great interest and attention of specialists from the medical field.

Director of research at the KMU, Professor Xin Shi has held a lecture on the importance of using clinical and non-clinical data, real time and in large volumes, for early diagnosis and prevention of various diseases. A visiting researcher from the Vilnius University Audronė Jakaitienė – chief researcher at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, Institute of Data Science and Digital Technologies, and Faculty of Medicine, Institute of Biomedicine – has attended the workshop and presented a report. She clarified a concept of “big data”, lucidly discussed the use of this technology in her research, and shared experience of implementing big data research at the Vilnius University. Audronė touched on the importance of developing suitable human resources in this area. There is a shortage of specialists working with health big data in Kazakhstan. However, this area is a very promising for development at the city, national and regional levels.

Evgeniy Scherbov, the director of the Command center of the Karaganda branch “Republican e-health”, has shared his experience of implementing electronic technologies in the field of healthcare in our region. His presentation aroused considerable interest among the audience, because currently e-health passports already cover 93 percent of the population and many people, including the workshop audience, use them in everyday life.

The KMU rector, doctor of medical sciences, Raushan Dosmagambetova summed up the meeting, and concluded that the development of health big data research done by scientists from the KMU and international colleagues is an interesting, necessary, and promising direction for implementation in Karaganda.