He spoke at the Pacific Health Summit in Seattle.

Technology developments aimed at businesses can help the medical field more than many people in health care may think, he said. For example, health care organizations often say that they have so much data, including patients' medical, billing and insurance information, that it will be a challenge for technology companies to build applications around the data, Mundie said.

But Mundie discovered that, in fact, the data collected by some businesses far surpasses that of health care groups. His researchers found that every five hours, consumers upload enough video to YouTube to match all data that the Beth Israel hospital system in Boston has collected in total over the past 27 years. Similarly, every day, consumers upload a volume of data in Facebook photos that equals all of the hospital's data, he said.

Beth Israel was the largest single health care system in terms of data that Microsoft could find in the U.S. in order to make this comparison, he said.

"While yes, medical data is big and complicated, by today's standard it's actually not very big," Mundie said.