i am the daughter of european refugees
so i deeply sympathize with the plight
of the unaccompanied children coming
into the united states from central
america
and the 50
million refugees we have in the world
today
50 million
why are there so many
population explosion
climate is capricious
flooding and droughts
happen more often
and they're more severe when they happen
they disrupt food production
and distribution
and they can wipe out entire population
centers
we have enormous challenges
and if we want to help
we know we have to do this with finite
resources
fortunately
we do have one abundant
renewable resource
that can make our aid efforts radically
more effective
and that resource is a flood of big data
and our capability to make sense of it
like never before
it's time to reimagine how we use these
resources
here's how big data
already being collected
can profoundly change the world
we can now forecast potential
humanitarian health care crises
we can understand the environment of a
population
and predict triggers
when is the temperature going to spike
or plummet
what infectious diseases are going to
pass through
an algorithm spotted the ebola virus
nine days before the world health
organization announced it
we could have used that time
we could have put simple precautions
into place
to contain the spread of that disease
early on
we can now identify and rank the value
of possible responses
for example
what preventative measures
are optimal to contain the spread of
ebola
what would have been the impact
of
reigning in the activities of infected
individuals
or getting people to use gloves when
they were handling dead animals
we can learn how feasible each of these
are and what the likely outcomes are
and
if there's a problem with any of these
actions that we can take
we can learn that and we can adapt with
analytics
we can understand the people we aim to
help
this is fundamental
specifically around the dynamics of
trust
last week in africa
eight people were killed by a mob
because of misunderstandings
the remedy to this problem is trust
and we could have avoided this tragedy
we could have used analytics to identify
regional tribal leaders
who were trusted in that community
and sent them in before anybody else
went in to dispel the fears
and the misbeliefs the misunderstandings
we can collaborate globally to share and
improve health care
in 2012 the state department distributed
a white paper
on how to train nurses
and it called for an ever evolving best
practices curriculum
curated
by experts and distributed via the cloud
on average
it takes 17 years
for
a medical insight to go through peer
review
and be adopted as a medical best
practice
boston children's hospital is collapsing
that time
and they're becoming borderless
with open pediatrics
it's a social learning platform
it uses
analytics
and
social networking capabilities
it's available to doctors and
nurses it enables them to collaborate
it's being used in over a hundred
countries
on six continents
it's open
it's free
it's happening now
real time
games let's talk about games
serious games come from the video gaming
industry
but they're being used to train
healthcare providers
and we can put an underlying layer of
big data into these games to enable them
to be so sophisticated that they can
replicate complex medical scenarios
a doctor or a nurse can use these games
to practice until they attain mastery on
a new technique
and they can make their first
their fatal mistakes on virtual patients
because health care threats vary
regionally and seasonally
serious games like these can be custom
curated and delivered to specific
individual practitioners based on the
patient scenarios and cases that they're
going to be treating
real time
not 17 years
let's follow the noble example set by
boston children's hospital
let's harness
this abundant renewable resource
and be ahead of the next health care
crisis
let's collapse 17 years into real time
to improve everybody's health
even refugees
let's imagine a future
where analytics is an integral part
of our health care
thank you