Big data is the term used to describe large amounts of data in reference to businesses. It is collected from a variety of sources such as social media or business sales. Big data can be used to save you time and money when developing new products. Combining big data benefits with other research (e.g. healthcare) can help discover the root of a failed project and protect from attempts at fraud.
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Information collected through big data can help websites decide the price they want to charge for an item. It can change based on the buyer’s location and other variables. It is used to predict what customers will buy in the future. Target is known for its extremely accurate predictions of what their customers will buy and when.
It can help you keep track of important customers. It can find out useful information about your customers because it uses multiple sources such as the customer’s buying habits or their social media webpages. This allows you to treat each customer like a celebrity.
Big Data Benefits
Big data can help identify customer complaints and find solutions to them. For example, if multiple customers file complaints to a store that they never have the items they need, the company can correct the issue by adjusting their next supply order.
Finally, you can use the information gathered from big data to change your business methods in real time: Real big data benefits for your business. This could be anything from changing your delivery route because of traffic to adjusting a feature in your product to cater to your customers.
For upwards of a century modern healthcare has been driven by the illusive goal of curing the incurable. Yet, diseases such as cancer have yet to be beaten. The tech giants of today are planning on changing that, though. Perhaps computer science-driven big data benefits will be able accomplish what we have yet to accomplish via the traditional beaker and test tube.
Microsoft
In a mere ten years, Microsoft is hoping to “solve” cancer. The amount of cancer research that has been published is far more than what any doctor could possibly read in a lifetime. But, it’s not enough data to overwhelm a computer.
“The complex processes that happen in cells have some similarity to those that happen in a standard desktop computer,” Chris Bishop, head of Microsoft Research’s Cambridge-based lab, told Fast Company.
You read that right, part of Microsoft’s plan is to treat the problem of cancer like the problem of a computer virus. Potentially, computers may be able to understand and predict the patterns of cancerous cells, leading to big data benefits for the healthcare industry.
The search engine’s main niche in the healthcare industry has been to combat diabetes, which is one of the most prevalent health issues of our day. They’ve partnered with French pharmaceutical group Sanofi in the hopes of creating a diabetes-fighting dream team.
Google is playing it smart by sticking to what it does best: gathering data. By allowing healthcare experts to take advantage of their algorithms and massive data-collecting abilities, they should be able to streamline the process so that professionals can move on to diagnosis and patient care more quickly than ever.
Chan Zuckerberg Biohub
The power couple, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, have lofty goals for their initiative. Namely, to cure, manage, and prevent all diseases by the end of the century.
Zuckerberg has noted that 50 times more funding goes to treatment, than it does to prevention. That’s where Biohub seeks to be a novel addition to the industry: by focusing in on how big data and machine-learning can stop diseases, before they can hurt people.
The aforementioned are just a few examples that point to a future where healthcare and tech companies are a unified front. In the future data will have the ability to effect change like never before.
“Think genomic, proteomic, metabolic data, clinical trial data, imaging data, electronic health records and wearable, self-tracking data, not to mention Google search data, credit history, geolocation and population behaviour information,” says Chemistry World.
That’s way, way more than any analyst could ever successfully survey. It’s more than any team could ever study in an all-encompassing manner. But it’s the kind of information set that tech companies are ready and willing to grapple with.
Officials at the Food and Drug Administration are talking with Google about using the company’s search technology to identify the side effects of drugs that it might not already know about, according to Bloomberg News.
The FDA already tracks these problematic side effects, also called adverse events. But the agency only knows about the adverse events that are reported and collected in a database, explains Regulatory Focus. Reports of adverse events can come from drug companies, patients, and doctors. But these voluntary reports can be uneven and sporadic. The FDA hopes studying Internet search data can uncover the symptoms and side effects that people are looking up, Bloomberg explains. This analysis of big data could identify the patterns and common terms associated with side effects and the drugs that may be causing them. It might even identify possible adverse events earlier than they are reported to FDA by physicians and drug companies.
Working with Google makes sense for the FDA because it would mark a major advance over the old system of relying on patients, physicians, and drug companies to report potential problems about medicines.
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