Data Mining as a Tool for Research and Knowledge Development in Nursing英文电子书.pdf

CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing • Vol. 22, No. 3, 123–131 • © 2004 Lippincott Williams Wilkins, Inc. Data Mining as a Tool for Research and Knowledge Development in Nursing It took humankind 300,000 years to accumulate 12 ex- abytes (1 billion gigabytes) of information. It will take just under 3 years to create the next 12 exabytes, ac- cording to a study from the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of Califor- nia, Berkeley.1 The world’s total annual production of information amounts to approximately 250 MB for each man, woman, and child on earth, and that number is expected to double every year for the foreseeable fu- ture.1 Ninety-three percent of the information that is currently produced each year is now stored in digital form.1 Increased computing power, decreasing costs, and advances in data capture and storage technologies for at least the next decade.3 Disk capacity, on the other have resulted in massive data sets in many disciplines, hand, is doubling every 9 months.4 IDC, a global including healthcare. Databases of gigabyte size are market intelligence and advisory firm in information common in the humanities, social, medical, and life sci- technology, reported that the primary informatics chal- ences.2 When one contemplates the newer units of mea- lenge is no longer data generation or storage. The bot- surement for data (exabyte, terabyte, petabyte), the vol- tleneck has shifted to just-in-time analysis and interpre- ume is staggering. Healthcare has always been tation of relevant data.5 It is clear that the gap data-rich. As more healthcare data are captured and continues to widen between the ability to collect and stored electronically, the need for new methods to de- store data and the