  Big Data are revolutionizing nearly every aspect of the modern society. One
area where this can have a profound positive societal impact is the field of
Health Care Informatics (HCI), which faces many challenges. The key idea behind
this study is: can we use some of the experience and technical and
methodological solutions from the fields that have successfully adapted to the
Big Data era, namely astronomy and space science, to help accelerate the
progress of HCI? We illustrate this with examples from the Virtual Observatory
framework, and the NCI EDRN project. An effective sharing and reuse of tools,
methods, and experiences from different fields can save a lot of effort, time,
and expense. HCI can thus benefit from the proven solutions to big data
challenges from other domains.
