Juli 2021 - Seite 27 von 49 - Cloud Computing Köln

According to a National Academy of Medicine discussion paper, social determinants of health (SDoH) account for upwards of 80% of a population’s health outcomes. Breaking this down further, 50% come just from socioeconomic and physical environment factors such as education, employment, income, family and social support, community safety, air and water quality, and access to housing and transit. SDoH determine access to and quality of healthcare, and are contributors to a system of disparate access to care.Click to enlargeWe believe that to more efficiently provide comprehensive healthcare access to more people, providers will leverage technology to blend in-person and virtual modes of care delivery.In this article, Amwell and Google Cloud examine five ways telehealth – as part of a provider’s overall care model – can help democratize access to healthcare. (graphic url) Remove distance as a barrier to care8.6 million Americans live more than 30 minutes from their nearest hospital. Long drives can deter patients from seeking care or maintaining routine visits. On the flip side, 92% of Americans nationwide have access to wired broadband in the home or through mobile broadband. Therefore, having a virtual visit just a click away can help remove barriers to care, like distance.Eliminate the risk of unnecessary exposureVirtual care means that patients don’t have to worry about potential exposure in transit, while sitting in waiting rooms, or from direct interactions during in-person health visits. This is particularly relevant when it comes to those with chronic diseases or underlying conditions. Telehealth provides patients who may be more susceptible to diseases with access to continuous healthcare without putting them at higher risk for developing more severe symptoms. Virtual visits can occur in the comfort –and safety– of patients’ homes.Extend access to specialized care55% of preventable hospitalization or mortality in rural settings is due to lack of access to specialty care. With telehealth, physical proximity to specialized services–typically in urban areas–can be reduced as a limiting factor. Virtual solutions grant everyone access to top specialists, regardless of location.Save time and moneyBy augmenting in-person visits with telehealth applications, providers can benefit from greater efficiencies in scheduling, helping to improve their bottom line, and add more flexibility to their workday. Meanwhile, patients can spend less on travel and childcare, limit time taken off work, and save on other costs associated with in-person visits — for a savings of $35 to $690 per visit. In a survey by the COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition, 76% of the 2,000+ patients surveyed across the US responded that transportation was removed as a barrier, 65% reported they no longer had to take time off from work for an appointment, and 67 percent reporting lower costs than an in-person visit.Combat physician shortage and fatigueResearch shows there will be a shortage of more than 100,000 doctors by 2030. In the midst of a physician shortage, telehealth can help improve care delivery and make it more efficient, ensuring more people can still have their healthcare needs addressed. Additionally, by integrating intelligence such as case triaging along with telehealth into a virtual care model, providers can help reduce clinician burnout.Amwell and Google Cloud are partnering to deliver transformative telehealth solutions that will make it easier for more patients to receive care and improve patient and clinician experiences across the continuum of care. One example includes embedding real-time captioning and translation services powered by Google Cloud’s AI and NLP technologies within the Amwell platform to increase health access and understanding for more people.As physicians, we are excited that the future of healthcare will continue to blend cloud technologies like EHR-integrated telehealth platforms, AI, healthcare-trained virtual agents along with in-person care to create an integrated hybrid care model that will improve patient outcomes and unburden providers, all while expanding access to broader patient populations.To learn more, download the whitepaper “Healthcare’s Virtual Transformation,” written in conjunction with Becker’s Hospital Review.1: “Social Determinants of Health 101 for Health Care: Five Plus Five,” National Academy of Medicine, October 2017
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

14. Juli 2021

da Agency

Batter up! Use machine learning to uncover what excites baseball fans

The game of baseball has no shortage of statistics — from batting average to exit velocity, strikeouts to wins above replacement. Among all sports, Major League Baseball (MLB) arguably contains the most analytical and data-driven participants and fan base. Subconsciously or viscerally, players and managers on the field and those following from anywhere are constantly assessing and making decisions based off of game play trends and expectations — whether a batter will come through with a hit in an important situation, when a pitcher should be pulled. Less analyzed, however, is what leads fans to become engaged with certain players or teams, and what factors drive their love of the game. This is the motivation behind the problem being posed by Major League Baseball in their Kaggle competition for Player Digital Engagement Forecasting. Can you use machine learning to deconstruct baseball fandom?This competition asks you to predict measures of digital engagement for each active player on a daily basis during the MLB season. So, how large was the surge in fan interest after Joe Musgrove threw the first no-hitter in Padres history? Is Shohei Ohtani’s engagement higher when he pitches well, when he hits a monster home run…or when he does both? You’re provided a wealth of game, team and player information – detailed stats, awards, rosters, and transaction information – as well as social and digital engagement data as your inputs. Data scientists will recognize this as an exciting forecasting problem with both traditional regression and time series components, where having this input data just prior to the prediction date is critical to determining which players will receive the most engagement. With so many variables in the game, there are an endless number of vectors which could possibly influence fan engagement. Eleven-time All-Star Miguel Cabrera delighted fans by hitting the first home run of the season – in the snow! Occasionally a lesser-known player like Musgrove or Carlos Rodón “wins the day” with an unlikely no-hitter. And sometimes just getting traded to an iconic franchise like the Yankees generates a ton of fan interest, like it did for Rougned Odor in early April.As these examples show, a player’s digital engagement can be pretty dynamic during the season, with many different potential contributors to who is “trending” on a given day. How can you use data to uncover which factors are the most influential of engagement with each player’s digital content?Ready to play ball? Check out the competition on Kaggle for all the details. $50,000 in prizes is up for grabs in two prize categories. The code competition puts your machine learning skills to the test, to see who can build the most accurate forecasting models to predict daily digital engagement for every active player. You’ll have until July 31st to build your models and then be evaluated on a future time frame, which will determine the winners. For data visualization and exploration experts out there, the explainability prizes give you an opportunity to analyze more broadly which factors, even those outside of what we’re providing directly, most influence digital engagement. You’ll be evaluated on how well you can use what the data is telling you to support your findings.And if you’re looking to get started, we’ve provided an introductory video and some notebook tutorials, including a starting point for harnessing the power of Vertex AI through tools including Cloud Notebooks, Explainable AI, and Vizier. With the second half of the season upon us, it’s an exciting time to be an MLB fan. With this Kaggle competition, it’s also a perfect opportunity to use data science to help understand baseball fandom and potentially earn some of your own accolades in the process. Step up to the plate!Major League Baseball trademarks and copyrights are used with permission of Major League Baseball. Visit MLB.com.Related ArticleHow BigQuery helps scale and automate insights for baseball fansAn in depth look at how BigQuery features and functionality can create insights from data for baseball fans.Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

14. Juli 2021

da Agency

Fresh ingredients to fresh insights: An inside look at Papa John's data cloud strategy

Editor’s note: In this blog, we look at how Cloud SQL delivered speed, flexibility, and agility to global pizza company Papa John’s International. With more than 5,400 locations in 50 countries and territories, Papa John’s International is one of the largest pizza chains in the world. In 2017, the company took a cloud-first strategy and kicked off our journey with Google Cloud. We started with a proof-of-concept (POC) project—a very small-scale integration with SADA—for a test set of data. This early test of Google Cloud brought flexibility and agility to the entire software development life cycle of that project. Today, Papa John’s runs on Cloud SQL, BigQuery, and Cloud Storage, as well as Kubernetes Engine, leveraging the power of data to fuel innovation and differentiation across the business, and Google Maps Platform to easily map customer deliveries. Our loyalty programs, our website and our customer and partner experiences are all powered by data. In addition, we’re also looking to equip stores with the power of real-time information to help them make deliveries on time.For our team, we’re seeing huge benefits on the database administration side. The scalability has become easier, provisioning is faster and the level of productivity is high. We’ve also significantly reduced our licensing costs, which also improves the bottom line. Now that we’re fully managed by Google Cloud, our DBAs and other teams can focus on new initiatives that grow our business and meet our customers’ needs.Cloud SQL is at the heart of our data initiativesCloud SQL has played a huge role in our data initiatives because it is fully managed, reliable, and secure and allows our developers to focus on value-added tasks. We use Cloud SQL with both MySQL and PostgreSQL, depending on the project. We began our transformation journey with a number of re-architecture projects, including revamping our loyalty program and moving our mapping system onto Google Maps Platform, which includes hours and locations for individual stores. This data was managed by our teams on-premises in Oracle, and we successfully moved it to the managed Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL database on the cloud. For this re-architecture project, we use Google Maps Platform to locate whether a customer’s address is within a store’s delivery zone.Here’s a look at a Papa John’s location map, powered by our back-end Cloud SQL databaseAnother project where Cloud SQL has been instrumental is in our commerce platform, which is built on Google Cloud. We partner with a number of third-party aggregators for deliveries and we need to make sure they’re integrated from both data and communications perspectives.We sometimes call the Customer Price Indexes (CPIs) of these aggregator partners to send them menu data, including product availability in stores, product configurations, and more. Our Java applications read that data and call the CPIs for our partner aggregators. Depending on the partner, integrations either push to the partner or respond to the partner’s request right away. We’re also running a call center for ordering, so our staff need to be able to respond quickly to ensure customers are satisfied. All of this data is stored and served from Cloud SQL. We have about 15 engineering teams following an agile process that uses our various databases. We have one central platform engineering team that uses Terraform and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to provision databases. Over the years, a huge benefit we’ve seen is on the database administration side. That team doesn’t have to do as much hands-on management as they were doing with the on-premises solutions. We worry less about the number of connections to the databases and how many applications are using the data. And since we are building our new databases on the cloud instead of on Oracle, the potential licensing costs are dramatically lower. Life in the cloud has brought us immense benefitsGoogle Cloud has helped transform our business. We use Cloud SQL with analytical systems like BigQuery, Google Cloud’s modern data warehouse, and most of these system’s real-time ingestions are event-driven.In a couple of use cases, we have multiple subscribers for a queue, and those subscribers would process the data and then -depending on the use case, would pump it into BigQuery for analysis. We have found this is a better approach rather than simply replicating all the data going into Cloud SQL into BigQuery.Looking ahead, we’re planning on moving our entire data systems from on-premises onto Google Cloud, which will help us reduce the footprint of our current databases and use better and lighter technologies. Our experience so far with Cloud SQL, BigQuery and other services makes us confident we’ll reach these goals and continue innovating with our roadmap.Compared to life before migration, it’s amazing to run on the cloud. With Google Cloud, the provisioning is so easy, the level of productivity is so high, and we don’t have to wait for all of the related infrastructure to be built up. It’s faster than auto-provisioning through several environments, and the need for troubleshooting is greatly minimized.If all this talk of moving data is making you hungry, join us for a slice—find a Papa John’s location near you. Ready to learn more about Cloud SQL? Get started with a free trial.Related ArticleBuilding a self-service microservices architecture with Cloud SQLMigrating from a monolithic on-premises to a microservices architecture with Cloud SQL and GKE helped Entegral offer self-service and sav…Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

The company is fighting back against new rules that go into effect today in India.