Does big data serve policy? Not without context. An experiment with in silico social science.

The DARPA Ground Truth project sought to evaluate social science by constructing four varied simulated social worlds with hidden causality and unleashed teams of scientists to collect data, discover their causal structure, predict their future, and prescribe policies to create desired outcomes. This large-scale, long-term experiment of in silico social science, about which the ground truth of simulated worlds was known, but not by us, reveals the limits of contemporary quantitative social science methodology. First, problem solving without a shared ontology-in which many world characteristics remain existentially uncertain-poses strong limits to quantitative analysis even when scientists share a common task, and suggests how they could become insurmountable without it.

The Communication and Care Plan: a novel approach to patient-centered clinical information systems.

The US health care system and its information access models are organized around institutions and providers. Patient-centered functionality is rarely present in prevailing information systems and, if present, it typically does not ideally support shared decision making about important treatment events. We sought to better understand the functional needs of providers and patients around the process of care plan decision making, and used this information to develop a prototype decision support tool, using women with newly diagnosed breast cancer as our clinical scenario.