The current period has been called the information age, where information is the most important element of society. Interestingly, with so much data being collected, the next age is the data analysis age wherein the analysis of data is important.
An interesting thing about research in medicine is that it has been oriented towards clinical trial, experiments in the lab, and also much of epidemiological data. However, now that there is so much data available the next big thing is to analyze the data. A group of people have been utilizing the data sets that are available in the medical area to just that.. look at the link below to find out more about hacking medicine.
But information is important. Take the example of Amazon that sold paper books.
However, it did not know what did people really read besides what they bought. That was like selling to a customer without knowing what the customer really wanted.. so they came up with the Kindle. The Kindle enabled them to get the analytics on what people read, where did they pause, how many pages per day and all the other important information that told them who the customer was… really.
If Medicine could get similar information, then it would be as revolutionary.