These five health IT predictions for the coming year pins their hopes on the potential of big data to support healthcare reform.

In 2014, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) put a strong stake in the health IT landscape, shifting critical healthcare conversations from simple theory to reality. Today, all healthcare stakeholders — providers, payers and technology vendors — are getting serious about making healthcare delivery more efficient and more effective. Even the big tech players like Apple, Oracle, and IBM have joined the “fix healthcare parade,” all having made major moves in healthcare this year.

One area of health IT that really took off this past year is big data.

There is a growing thirst for quality, fact-based information in healthcare. As providers begin to place more and more focus on aggregating and analyzing patient data from various sources (e.g., EMRs, administrative systems, claims processing systems) and determining how to make the best use of all this important information, clinicians are increasingly seeing value in evidence-based decision-making. As we move into 2015, big data will no doubt continue to play a key role in moving the needle on improving care delivery and patient outcomes.

Given the changing healthcare landscape, we predict the following for 2015:

Physicians will begin to embrace rather than abhor EMRs.

We will see a rise in the democratization of health information.

Pharma will take more of a care provider or services role in healthcare.

A massive data breach will force real action around health data privacy.

Quality will rise as the future king of the industry.