Data sets are getting larger and larger, and there's a lot of useful information just waiting to be made sense of. Nowhere is this truer than in the health care industry.

Different hospitals have different platforms for managing data, which makes it exceedingly difficult to exchange information. Although it has been a slow process, the U.S. is moving toward a health care market that provides care more efficiently. Part of this includes implementing electronic health records and managing hospital costs.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act allocated about $20 billion for electronic health records. This portion of the act offers financial incentives to hospitals and physicians to adopt and use health care information technology. The other positive is that many organizations face penalties for non-compliance, starting in 2015.

With all this "reform" coming to the health care industry, one of the best ways to invest in the coming health care data boom is Allscripts Healthcare Solutions (Nasdaq: MDRX).

Yet the stock hasn't been all that great to investors over the past couple of years. Thanks to a botched acquisition, MDRX is still down nearly 50% from its 2007 highs. The multi-year pressure was a result of the 2010 acquisition of Eclipsys that proved to be more trouble than it was worth.