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"In March 2020, the NHS needed to make life-or-death decisions on the back of understanding whether curves were trending up or down. For the first time ever, they connected data flows from across the entire system.
That is a potentially overwhelming amount of data – but, crucially, they weren’t paralysed by this sudden torrent... Why was that?
Well, working alongside the NHS, we applied approaches from a nascent field called decision intelligence. We used this data to build the understanding the NHS needed to make confident decisions about which hospital wards to open or close, and which resources to send where.
Rather than just showing data on current levels of patient demand, we could also show demand for tomorrow or next month, the reasons why demand was changing, how that affected resources such as beds or ventilators, and what actions they could take.
Rather than making decisions on data alone, the NHS made them on an understanding of how and why events were unfolding. The collective results have been widely credited with saving thousands of lives."
As Marc Warner points out, DI lets us create models, develop understanding about the behavior of these models, and use them to create the "data from the future" we need to make better decisions.