Practical, Privacy and Ethical, and Philosophical Considerations for Using Big Data in Medical Education

In this issue of Academic Medicine , Thelen and colleagues present a thoughtful perspective on the emerging opportunity to use longitudinal educational data to improve graduate medical education and optimize the education of individual residents, and call for the accelerated development of large interinstitutional data sets for this purpose. Such applications of big data to medical education hold great promise in terms of informing the teaching of individuals, enhancing transitions between phases of training and between institutions, and permitting better longitudinal education research. At the same time, there is a tension between whose data they are and consequently how they ought to be used. This commentary proposes some practical, privacy and ethical, and philosophical considerations that need to be explored as early efforts to aggregate data across the medical education continuum mature and new efforts are undertaken.