Symposium on Big Data Analytics in Healthcare

MIS Event

This past October I virtually attended 2014’s Symposium on Big Data Analytics which was held at the University of Arizona.  This year’s focus was on healthcare, and what I found most interesting was Brian Norris and Mark Silverberg’s talk about how social media data is being used to help inform disease and disaster surveillance.  They focused on Twitter due to the mass amount of users it has representing all different regions and demographics.  By filtering out tweets with key words they were able to tracks healthcare trends and report their findings of high correlations.  They also explained how social media such as Twitter can be utilized for surveillance and lead a healthcare revolution.

I believe that this event could be interesting to not only MIS professionals and students but to anyone who has an interest in what is being done with big data and how it helps certain industries.  It was an eye opening event for myself and the biggest thing that I got out of it is how social media, something that is frequently seen as a waste of time and a distraction from work, is now being analyzed by professionals and used as an informational tool for the healthcare industry.

To view the videos from this event click here.