Exploitation of "Big Data": The experience feedback of the french military health service on sanitary data

In recent years, the number of data circulating on the Internet has exploded causing the phenomenon of "Big Data". In the health field, the mass of data circulating on the Internet has also become bloated. From a study conducted within the french medical health service, this article aims to explore the construction of knowledge generated by the "Sanitary Big Data". It analyzes the creation of value made and the limitations of this “ Big Data". The result is a an exploitation of polymorphic data mainly from global programs for infectious disease surveillance including PromedMail and Sentiweb. It shows the use of data from clinical trials of the Cochrane Library and the use of data of social medias and social networks. This real time data are exhautive of the population´s health status. It also shows the construction of knowledge, which quickly reveals the emergence of diseases that may affect the forces in operation, as in 2009, during the H1N1 pandemic. We may also mention the anticipation of new pharmaceutical innovations, for example to detect the effectiveness of new treatments, such as in the context of the current epidemic of Ebola. As main limitations, it shows a data mining that does not offer interpretation of results and potential ethical drifts on handling health data.