Healthcare Big Data is Déjà vu All Over Again

My colleagues and I chuckle when we hear about all the ‘new benefits’ from Big Data. We chuckle because we have been using large datasets (what today is called Big Data) for years to help companies glean insights and intelligence from customer data. The goal has been to get the “right offer, to the right person, at the right time”. This means that we sought to understand the customer and their needs enough to be able to make the right product offer to them when they were most likely to accept or respond to the offer.  To accomplish this, behavior analysis and predictive modeling was used to create more effective acquisition and retention programs and to build actionable customer segmentations. The segmentation schemes enabled the company to manage similar customers as a group with emphasis on keeping the top customers in their segments and motivating the other customers to ‘move up’ the segmentation schema.