The connected era has given anybody with a device that has access to the internet more information than most people are capable to use. These opportunities, which are such a vital part of contemporary life, also offer extraordinary, intimate and almost infinite personal information.

Those omnipresent membership cards and key tags for the local shop, fitbit tracking your physical action, and the app that lets you know about the shoe sale in the store as you are walking past are all part of the huge initiative of collecting, examining, and understanding dissimilar bits of information that decrease under the umbrella of "big data".

5 things We should know about India’s healthcare system.

1. Rural Versus Urban Divide

While the opportunity to enter the market is very ripe, India still spends only around 4.2% of its national GDP towards healthcare goods and services (compared to 18% by the US). Additionally, there are wide gaps between the rural and urban populations in its healthcare system which worsen the problem. A staggering 70% of the population still lives in rural areas and has no or limited access to hospitals and clinics. Consequently, the rural population mostly relies on alternative medicine and government programmes in rural health clinics. One such government programme is the National Urban Health Mission which pays individuals for healthcare premiums, in partnership with various local private partners, which have proven ineffective to date.

The generations who were born before 80’s retain a nostalgic memory of their childhood illness. There was this friendly neighborhood doctor- elderly, respectable, kind, soft-spoken, witty, smart. One can walk to his clinic round the corner, to join a long line of people. The parents would patiently wait for their turn, chatting with neighbors about symptoms and schools, and observed a busy 'compounder' who dispensed medicine bottles of dark colored bitter medicine according to doctor's note. As a child, you were terrified to go in to get injection. You often did not notice actual injection, as the pain is drowned in your cry of fear and doctor’s witty remarks. You would suddenly start feeling great as you come out and pick up your bitter dark medicine. Overall, most of the time, one got better and cured after the doctor visit. The fee– paid in cash to the doctor- was a comfortably small fraction of one’s salary. Our vocabulary of ‘treatment’- (there was no such a word as- 'healthcare') is about 10 words, and involved less than 5 people- doctor, patient, compounder, nurse, dispensary, hospital, operation, medicine, illness, wellness.

Data is hot right now. We generate tons of it, but most of it sits there, latent, unused and useless. This is particularly pronounced when it comes to health and fitness data, where we strap on our fitness trackers and expect the pounds to melt away with each step passively logged.

But we haven't seen a dramatic improvement in our nation’s health with the emergence of the "quantified self movement" and the pervasiveness of wearables. We still live in a country where two-thirds of us are overweight or obese and 80 percent of adults do not get the recommended amount of exercise.

We forget that data alone is not the key to solving America’s health crisis. Knowing our step count or flights of stairs climbed won’t change our behavior. However, data with context - data that is proactive, timely and actionable - gives us the opportunity to design our environments for success and can help enable us to reach our health goals.