I got an email promoting a seminar on health care research that made a rather unusual statement:
"U.S. healthcare systems are gorged with data. In 2020, the amount of healthcare data estimated to have been collected was 2.314 trillion gigabytes."
I did a google search and found a couple of websites with the phrase "2.314 trillion gigabytes"
How Data-Driven Healthcare Improves Patient Outcomes
AI Special Feature: "The Cyborg Will See You Now"
| Pharmalive |
remove preview |
|
| AI Special Feature: "The Cyborg Will See You Now" |
| How Artificial Intelligence Could Infuse Genuine Humanity Back into Healthcare Michael Spitz Chief Strategic Storyteller Blitz Strategy The Good Old Days Once upon a time the "family doctor" was a trusted and beloved professional who arguably dispensed as much emotional support as medical advice. |
| View this on Pharmalive > |
|
|
| Bottle Rocket |
remove preview |
|
| How Data-Driven Healthcare Improves Patient Outcomes |
| The healthcare industry is flush with data on everything from patients to pathologies-the kind of data decision-makers in other industries can only dream about. |
| View this on Bottle Rocket > |
|
|
and it gets a bit weirder. Both articles cite the 2.314 trillion gigabytes and use that to help us better understand the magnitude of 2,314 exabytes. So here are my questions.
- Does anyone really know the storage usage to four significant figures?
- Wouldn't 2,314 exabytes actually equal 2.314 billion (not trillion) gigabytes?
- Is there actually 2,314 exabytes of storage total in the world, much less storage reserved for health care?
I wonder if this is one manifestation of the famous quote that 86.3% of all statistics are made up.
------------------------------
Stephen Simon, blog.pmean.com
Independent Statistical Consultant
P. Mean Consulting
------------------------------