4. Information will flow more easily. Petro looked back to his days prior to working in health IT to remember what being in a hospital is like from a patient's perspective. "I always remember sitting in a room with someone who's sick, and you're wondering what the heck is going on," he said. "Then a physician comes in, and you're afraid to talk to them." He said there's a lack of information flow, and a lack of ability for both physicians and patients to make choices. "The interesting part is, that happens all over the place within the workflow," he said. After "cracking the code" of big data, he continued, the flow of information not only will be easier for physicians, but will more easily extend to patients. "For example, I can tap on my cell phone and see there's a 15-minute ED wait over here, and a five-minute wait over here. It's making the availability of data more ubiquitous, and I think it's going to come in plain and simple ways like that, and in more complicated ways, like diagnostic support and evidence-based medicine support in the workflow."

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5. Quality of care will increase to maintain revenues and drive costs down. From a cost perspective and a quality of care point of view, said Petro, there are a number of different areas that will be impacted. For example, if a patient experiences an injury while staying in a facility, the organization isn't reimbursed for his/her care. "So the ability for a system to see that this [has the potential] to happen and alert everyone, so that type of thing doesn't happen to me as a patient," said Petro. "The one way the government is putting pressure on that is you won't be compensated like the old days." Through reporting, Petro predicts, these issues will become less and less common. "They're going to tap into the information, and that's just one example," he said. "There are a whole bunch of things that could happen that are preventable and should be completely avoidable. After tapping into the information, I think that's going to drive down the cost of healthcare."

6. The physician-patient relationship will grow with the help of social media and mobile apps. And this all stems from the need for hospitals to keep patients healthy and out of their facilities, said Petro. "We have this whole notion of an ACO, and hospitals are going to start getting comped for keeping you healthy. In the old days, hospitals made money the sicker you are, and the longer they keep you there, the more they make." Petro predicted that because of this, there will be an "explosion" of mobile applications and even social media, allowing patients to have easier access to nurses and physicians. "It's about keeping [patients] healthy and driving down costs," he said. "Those are the two major areas where there's going to be a lot of stuff going on from a health information technology point of view, all underpinned by the availability of data, and tapping into that."