Look out of your window. If, like me, you see lots of green then you already know that you’re looking at chlorophyll. And I’m sure you also know that the people around you exist because that green stuff produces oxygen. And you might even remember that the world wasn’t always like this. For about half its life, our planet’s atmosphere was mostly nitrogen and carbon dioxide. It wasn’t until about 2.4 billion years ago that first algae then later plants started to pump out oxygen, creating the oxygen-rich atmosphere that allowed animals to evolve. This was an event that we can, without any hyperbole, call transformational. Not only did it drive the evolution of us eukaryotes, but it also set off a change in Earth’s mineral composition because the atmosphere became oxidising rather than reducing. More than half of the 4,500 minerals that exist on Earth today are the result of the Great Oxidation Event (GOE), as it is appropriately called.

How is all this relevant to digital health today? Well, there are interesting parallels. Until relatively recently, life sciences companies and the other creatures that inhabit the healthcare environment lived in a relatively data-poor environment. Just as pre-GOE life forms were adapted to an anoxic, oxygen-poor environment, pharma and medtech companies used to work in what was, relatively speaking, a data-poor environment. Trust me, I was there. Outside clinical trials, a bit of market research and the sales figures, we used to fly blind.

But things are changing. Those existing data sources are already producing much more data than they used to. Whether it’s big-data bioinformatics, more granular market data or more sophisticated management information, what we have to work with now is much richer than it used to be. More importantly, our sources of health data are expanding rapidly. Not only do we generate new data (all of the ‘omics, for example) but lots of data we used to allow to evaporate is now being captured. In some healthcare settings, everything that is measured about patients, across their entire journey is sucked up and organised into a holistic view not only of these patients but of the patient population. And this data creation and capturing is only going to accelerate as everything from wearables to apps to point of care diagnostics effuse data into the healthcare atmosphere. Just as the GOE changed the Earth, the Great Data Event (GDE) will change the healthcare world.

I don’t want to stretch the parallels too far, but I think there is some value in analogising between the GOE and today’s GDE. The obvious lesson to learn is that oxygen-breathers evolved to be an important part of the ecosystem, complementing the oxygen-producers. This implies that any life sciences company that doesn’t learn to ‘breathe’ data isn’t likely to evolve or survive. A more subtle lesson lies in the Lomagundi-Jatuli event when the rise in oxygen content stalled and then dipped. This stimulated the evolution of eukaryotes. In the same way, the growth of data is likely to be uneven. That would favour firms that could use data more intelligently than their rivals. But perhaps the most significant lesson is that although the GOE was kicked off by cyanobacteria, it wasn’t that life form that transformed the environment. It was the higher, multicellular life forms that did that. That suggests that little apps won’t change the world, data-enabled companies will.

That brings me to what a bit of careful thought can teach us. Nobody can deny that digital health will transform the environment. But it won’t be the apps that do it. They’ll help kick it off, as will my smartwatch, my GP sharing my health records and Google knowing that I’ve got an interest in osteoarthritis. But no future historian will write that ‘mood-tracking apps transformed the healthcare environment’. They, and much of the rest of the noise in the digital health space, are less important than that. But what they are part of – the Great Data Event – will change the way life sciences companies create value. And that is more important than the hype suggests.

This column is also available as a podcast here or search ‘Darwin’s Medicine’ on your podcast provider.