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Thought leadership is just a part of what we do to help advance the practice of public health. InductiveHealth was honored to be able to present at the 2014 Public Health Informatics Conference on topics surrounding how the public health space can make effective use of big data technologies. Clearly this is an area of interest, as evidenced by the standing room only crowd!
Thanks to everyone who attended and for the insightful questions.
InductiveHealth’s Managing Director, Matthew Dollacker, was recently covered in a piece by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s New Public Health Blog. The article focused on key topics from Matthew’s recent APHA talk on big data in the public health arena.
Though highly-structured, coded data will continue to be a mainstay in public health and healthcare, there is an ongoing revolution taking place in the use of extremely large, semi-structured and unstructured data sets to gather new insights through advanced machine learning techniques.
InductiveHealth is at the forefront of this revolution, which promises to transform the information tools available to public health institutions.
From the article:
“Data production will be 44 times greater in 2020 than it was in 2009,” said Dollacker. “And those who are positioned to take advantage of this data explosion are those that are aware of it, can access it, and can handle it.” …
Dollacker highlighted a couple of recent examples that show the potential big data has for public health. One instance was the Google Flu project – merely based on what users were searching on google.com, the search engine was able to take that data and help predict flu outbreaks at a regional and city level – ahead of official sources.
“What this highlights,” said Dollacker, “is the tremendous value that is sitting out there in data right now. Who would have thought we could have address this issue by looking at nothing more than existing search terms?”