Analytics continues to bring dramatic change to the healthcare industry in the United States and other countries, offering advances and challenges for the year ahead. Following are 10 trends to chart in 2016.
David Simchi-Levi, MIT Professor, INFORMS Fellow and Former Editor-in-Chief of Operations Research (INFORMS Journal)
The ability to understand a combination of historical behavior, market conditions and future needs drives decision making. New analytic capabilities that combine machine learning and optimization can take into account historical characteristics and competitor behavior to determine future demand that will allow optimization for the best results - such as profit, market share or revenue.
Examples of decisions where this approach can be used is assortment, pricing, sourcing strategies for new products, predictive maintenance using process sensors.
During WWII, academics developed “Operations Research” techniques involving statistics and linear programming to hunt enemy submarines, supply troops on the ground and deliver ordnance to targets. Soon after the war ended, Operations Research academics began to apply their methodologies to investing. In 1952 Harry Markowitz, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, published a paper on portfolio selection in the Journal of Finance. Markowitz’s quantitative approach to investment theory was radically different from the conventional stock market wisdom at the time, which focused on picking winning stocks and concentrating stock holdings to maximize return. Investors knew that holding stocks meant taking risks, and they were led to believe that the only way to reduce risk was to become more competent at picking stocks. Some investors were following the advice of Gerald M. Loeb, the co-founder of brokerage firm E.F. Hutton, who wrote “once you obtain competency, diversification is undesirable.” Markowitz’s work along with others gave birth to what is now known as Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT). MPT provided investors quantitative ways to reduce risk and optimize their return.
While you’ll have to determine your own goals and certification needs, let’s look at a handful of important and valuable certifications all IT professionals should consider earning.
CAP certification enables you to understand the entire analytics process. From framing business and analytic problems to deployment and model lifecycle management, you’ll have full knowledge of everything that goes into general analytics by the time you finish this certification process.
Finding the optimal way to use a workforce is not an art — it’s a science. In small groups a missing employee can cause sleepless nights when deadlines approach, while an extra employee can result in missed performance metrics. In large groups, such as Fortune 500 companies, these same problems can cost a company billions of dollars or result in thousands of lost jobs. Management science applies the principles of mathematics to the modern office to streamline processes, cut costs and grow revenue.
Jeff Cohen
Chief Strategy Officer
INFORMS
Catonsville, MD
[email protected]
443-757-3565
An audio journey of how data and analytics save lives, save money and solve problems.
With seemingly no limit to the demand for artificial intelligence, everyone in the energy, AI, and climate fields is justifiably worried. Will there be enough clean electricity to power AI and enough water to cool the data centers that support this technology? These are important questions with serious implications for communities, the economy, and the environment.
It’s college graduation season, which means over 4 million seniors will graduate in the next few weeks, flooding the job market with new candidates. One area that has shown high potential for the right candidates is artificial intelligence and machine learning. Both disciplines are part of the larger data and analytics career path.
Drugs being explicitly developed to treat rare diseases are getting more expensive.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as the new secretary of Health and Human Services, is the nation’s de facto healthcare czar. He will have influence over numerous highly visible agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, among others. Given that healthcare is something that touches everyone’s life, his footprint of influence will be expansive.
The recent US-China agreement to temporarily reduce tariffs is a major step for global trade, with tariffs on US goods entering China dropping from 125% to 10% and on Chinese goods entering the US decreasing from 145% to 30% starting May 14. While this has boosted markets and created optimism, key industries like autos and steel remain affected, leaving businesses waiting for clearer long-term trade policies.
With sweeping new tariffs on Chinese-made products set to take effect this summer, Americans are being urged to prepare for price hikes on everyday goods. President Donald Trump's reinstated trade policies are expected to affect a wide swath of consumer imports, including electronics, furniture, appliances, and baby gear. Retail experts are advising shoppers to act before the tariffs hit and prices rise.
Twenty years ago, few people would have been able to imagine the energy landscape of today. In 2005, US oil production, after a long decline, had fallen to its lowest levels in decades, and few experts thought that would change.
In the case of upgrading electrical and broadband infrastructure, new analysis from the University of Massachusetts Amherst reveals {that a} “dig once” strategy is almost 40% more economical than changing them individually.