This document discusses healthcare analytics and how big data can be used in healthcare. It notes that healthcare analytics focuses on either precision of diagnosis and treatment using large amounts of data on individual patients, or improving quality, cost and operations using some patient data across many individuals. The document provides examples of how analytics could help identify frequent emergency room visitors to intervene, optimize end of life care, and reduce unnecessary "defensive care". Both areas are data problems that can be addressed with large individual patient datasets or smaller datasets across many patients.