Link Collection — January 20, 2013

• Lower Costs and Better Care for Neediest Patients : The New Yorker

  Excellent article on using data to provide an unusual window into healthcare, and how to improve it.

  “Besides looking at assault patterns, he began studying patterns in the way patients flowed into and out of Camden’s hospitals. “I’d just sit there and play with the data for hours,” he says, and the more he played the more he found. For instance, he ran the data on the locations where ambulances picked up patients with fall injuries, and discovered that a single building in central Camden sent more people to the hospital with serious falls—fifty-seven elderly in two years—than any other in the city, resulting in almost three million dollars in health-care bills. “It was just this amazing window into the health-care delivery system,” he says.”

  tags: healthcare datascience newyorker

• Solving the Wanamaker problem for health care – O’Reilly Radar

  Good article by Tim O’Reilly, et al. Broad coverage of healthcare issues and opportunities with data science.
   
  “How is data science transforming health care? There are many ways in which health care is changing, and needs to change. We’re focusing on one particular issue: the problem Wanamaker described when talking about his advertising. How do you make sure you’re spending money effectively? Is it possible to know what will work in advance?”

  tags: healthcare datascience O’Reilly

• Why IT Fumbles Analytics – Harvard Business Review

  This is an excellent article. Calls out the different thinking and actions required for analytics success. Despite the title, this is not an IT bashing article.

  “In their quest to extract insights from the massive amounts of data now available from internal and external sources, many companies are spending heavily on IT tools and hiring data scientists. Yet most are struggling to achieve a worthwhile return. That’s because they treat their big data and analytics projects the same way they treat all IT projects, not realizing that the two are completely different animals”.

  tags: hbr analytics bigdata

• Disruptions: Design Is Driving Technology Forward – NYTimes.com

  “We’re on the tail end of technology being special,” says John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design. “The automobile was a weird alien technology when it first debuted, then, after a while, it evolved and designers stepped in to add value to it.”

  …“We have this exciting next step for design,” he said. “Now that we have enough technology to do anything, design can now begin to be better than the technology itself.”

  tags: technology design maeda

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.