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TED@IBM – How Big Data is Improving Healthcare

This statistic blew me away: A single patient in one day can generate 100 million data points. Think of the number of patients in a given hospital. If you have 300 patients in a hospital at a given time, that is 30 TRILLION data points per day. What is happening to all of that data? I would guess 90% of it isn’t used or even looked at. Could that data be better used to provide better care in real-time? That was the topic of IBM’s Inhi Cho Suh at the TED@IBM conference last week. In her example of how big data can be used to transform healthcare, she talks about intensive care units. The many systems and machines running at one time surround the patient with white noise and interruptive alarms. She explains that alarms were once necessary for the doctors to provide care, but today, 90% of alerts and alarms are inactionable. So, how can hospitals better use the data they’re collecting? How can doctors provide better care without spending hours and hours collecting and analyzing data from all of the different monitoring systems? Suh explains that with power stream computing, this data analysis in real-time is possible and […]

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Top 5 takeaways from the Digital Marketing University

Last week I attended the SilverPOP’s Digital Marketing University in Minneapolis – the turnout was great! This was a special event for us because SmartBase CEO, Kris Lynch, was presenting “Delivering the Right Experience across Channels”, in which she detailed how marketers can move through the Collection and Analysis stages to reach the Engagement design stage. All of the speakers contributed a piece of the omni-channel marketing puzzle, giving us a clear picture of how to achieve engaging marketing that our customers have been waiting for. Here are my top 5 takeaways from DMU 2014: 1.       Good Marketing is Like a Conversation. Marketing used to be a one way street. Organizations had a message and they sent that message to the clients and basically told them what, how and when to buy. The age of the internet in every pocket has given consumers the keys to the buyer’s journey and they’ve left organizations in the dust. In order to remain relevant, marketing must open themselves up to a two-way dialogue between their customers and the company, on every platform that the customer has available to them. The technology and tools to do this well and measure the impact are here. 2.       […]

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How to Succeed in the Age of the Empowered Healthcare Consumer

Did you know that 72% of internet users have looked online for healthcare information in the last year? If you search Google for “Symptom Checker”, you’ll come across websites like WebMD, Mayo Clinic, and 100 other websites that offer free healthcare information to consumers. The healthcare model has flipped significantly, putting the consumer in the driver’s seat of their own healthcare journey. They are getting information where they want it, how they want it and when they want it. The doctor has become an advisor or a guide on this journey instead of the primary source of healthcare information. With all of the readily available info, how can healthcare keep consumers engaged? The change in roles throughout the healthcare industry has pushed hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and clinics to drastically alter the way they are marketing to the masses. Because the industry is no longer controlling this flow of information, it’s more important than ever to understand the needs and behaviors of the consumer. Instead of pharmaceutical companies speaking the healthcare language, they have had to create clear, simple and compassionate messaging to appeal to the everyday person. Another challenge for healthcare was to find ways to reach out to people will […]

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