Real Case Stories

This Fortune article talks about how many Employers are using third party firms to analyse Medical reimbursements, pharmacy claims and Search queries to predict whether an employee is trying to get pregnant, is pregnant or about to undergo any major surgery. Castlight Health  is an Enterprise Healthcare management platform that lets companies provide employees with personalized tools for healthcare benefits. According to the Fortune article, Castlight has the ability to gather employees' medical information and then predict who's at risk for being diagnosed with diabetes, who's considering pregnancy and who may need a back surgery. Also read "Behavior targeting - How Target knew about customer's pregnancy before her own Father knew about it"

Behavioral analysis is becoming a new tool in the hands of marketers. According to this NYT story , Target's statistician received a brief from the marketing department “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ”.  After analyzing the voluminous data that Target collects, the trends that he observed were that Pregnant ladies tended to Buy large quantities of unscented lotions In the first 20 weeks, pregnant ladies loaded up on supplements like Calcium, Magnesium and Zinc Buy Hand sanitizers Buy Extra bags of cotton balls  He came up with a "Pregnancy Prediction score" which would analyze shopping data and predict when the shopper is due.  Target would then use this data to send out promotional material to the shoppers. One day a man walked into Target and yelled angrily at the Manager. He was furious that Target was sending coupons of cribs, maternity clothing and baby clothes to his High...