Big Data in Action: Public Health and Small Business Lending

Harvard Business Review has two posts on big data that are relevant to our ongoing discussions and worth reading: Karen Mills, former head of the SBA, suggests that it might be used to tackle small business lending concerns:

...as new entrants increasingly experiment with cash-flow and direct-deposit data as a means of better predicting the ability of a small business to repay its loans, those with easy access to that data could have a real advantage.

Bechara Choucair, Jay Bhatt and Raed Mansour in a joint article address the ways that big data can be a boon to public health incentives in urban centers:

There is a great opportunity in public health to use analytics to promote data-driven policies. We need to use our data better, share it with the public and our partners, and then leverage that data to create better policies, systems and environmental changes.