#104: Global.Health: Big Data for Good

 In Episode 104, Quinn & Brian discuss: the future of data and medicine.

Our guests are: Robel Kassa & Dr. Sam Scarpino, two of the brilliant minds behind Global.Health, which is setting a new standard for epidemiological data. Global.Health is the first of its kind: an easy-to-use global data repository and visualization platform that enables open access to real-time epidemiological anonymized line-list data, including a COVID-19 dataset that contains detailed information on over five million anonymized cases from over 100 countries.

But this isn’t our first brush with Big Data, and we’ve seen how data can be used to cause material harm, both indirectly and directly. So, can we trust a platform that is trying to aggregate and anonymize all of the world’s health records around COVID? What are we sacrificing by allowing this data to be collected? And will creating such a platform help us predict or prevent another surprise pandemic in the future? We’re trying to wrap our heads around all of that and why the people building the platform are just as important as the data collected, possibly including yours.

Have feedback or questions? Tweet us, or send a message to questions@importantnotimportant.com

Important, Not Important Book Club:

• "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" by Ocean Vuong
• "Pachinko" by Min Jin Lee

Links:

• Global.Health
• dataforprogress.org
• Donate to diaper relief: importantnotimportant.com/diapers
• Dr. Scarpino on Twitter: @svscarpino
• Robel on Twitter: @rawbubble

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• Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com

Important, Not Important is produced by Crate Media