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Alpha Looks at Health Care

In the series of articles we have been running, we've seen The Cloud, Watson, Google and other technologies.  (See both Internet & Technology and Science)

Now we will cover a bit about Alpha Mathematica.  We've been using Mathematica for about 5 years.  It's a wonderful tool to allow engineers, mathematicians and scientist to do their work.  It takes the tedium out of the day to day stuff.

It was invented by Stephen Wolfram and you should look at this man as one of the shapers of the world.  There is a video that is worth watching that enlightens us about his new idea Alpha Mathematica. 

What is Alpha

It's a plain language mathematical Google.  You can ask it questions and it will look at the available information tucked away and present it to you in a form you want.   It's a way to see relationships.  Here are some examples  that we did to illustrate for you:

Canada

We asked Alpha to go get the Gross Domestic Product of Canada over the last 50 years and to plot it for us.  The graph below is what it returned. 

It shows the steady growth of the GDP, which is what we produce as a nation to a maximum of $1.586 trillion dollars in 2007 converted to US dollars.    Notice the dip in the recession of 2008 and the recovery.  Some of our graphs will have a 2007 end date, but not all  of them.   The one below goes to 2010

Canadian Gross National Product 1961 to 2010

Next we ask to see the Health Care costs for the period starting in 1970 as a percentage of GDP.   That's shown below. This line strangely bounces around, but it is so far less than 10% of GDP, which is good.

Canadian Health Care Costs as a percentage of GDP

Canadian Health Care Costs per person has a high of $3898.80 per year

Sometimes we think about Health Care in Canada as free, but it is not as you can see from $3898.80 and the graph above.  This number does not include what you do to support local clinics and all the fund raising for the hospitals and doctor recruitment.

Next we try to get a look at comparable US figures.  The first we look at is for GDP, which reached almost $15 trillion in the year 2010.  Again you can see the dip due to the recession and the recovery. 

The United States

US Gross National Product (about 15.93 trillion last year)This is 10 times the Canadian GDP

US Health Care Costs to 2007 (highest is $2.199 Trillion per year in 2007)  This is a per capita cost of $7291 per person versus $3898.80 for Canada

The US cost of Health Care can be further broken down to total $2.199 trillion.  The public cost is $997.5 billion per year in 2007 with a private cost of $1.201 Trillion totaling and rounding to $2.199 trillion.

So in less than 10 minutes, we were able to get these graphs out of Alpha. Keep in mind that they may not exist any place else.  They were created by almost plain English language queries and here they are in the Saugeen and Kincardine Times, not in the Globe and Mail or the NY Times.   We have the world at our fingertips. 

Now to be sure Alpha is a bit rough now, but it shows great potential.  I know you will enjoy the future.  Isn't the web wonderful?

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Monday, January 31, 2011