Posted by
Corporate Vice President, Technology Policy
The world is awash in data—on one estimate, almost three zettabytes (three billion terabytes) of information had been created by 2012, a digital deluge that is growing at around 50% a year. A unique combination of technological innovation, social media, ubiquitous connectivity and digital globalization, among other factors, is fueling this exponential growth in the volume, variety and availability of data. At the same time, increasingly powerful computing technologies can now take massive amounts of these data, commingle them, and use advanced machine-learning and analytics to gain new insights and knowledge. And we are only at the start of this data revolution.
As the World Economic Forum (WEF) observes in a new report, Unlocking the Value of Personal Data: From Collection to Usage, these technologies hold extraordinary potential for new innovations, economic growth and societal benefit. For example, predictive models developed from large-scale hospital data sets can be used to identify patients who are at the highest risk of being rehospitalized within 30 days after they are discharged. A recent analysis using Microsoft technology applied machine learning to a large multi-year data set of patient hospitalizations in the Greater Washington, DC, metropolitan area. The resulting predictive model can reveal risk factors that were previously undetectable: for example, if a patient was admitted for congestive heart failure, they were more likely to be readmitted within 30 days if they were depressed or taking drugs for gastrointestinal disorders.
...(read more)