There are some things we can never know: The grief of a Syrian father as he finds his three-year-old son lifeless on the beach; how it feels to leave your home and community behind in the dark of night, knowing you may never return, with nothing but the need to keep your family safe from harm.

But we should be able to know when and where the next migration will occur. We should be able to predict how many people it will affect and the impact on surrounding areas. We have the technology—right here, right now—to create a new, agile, insightful model that will predict mass migrations and help us better serve displaced families even before they are displaced. We can do all this now. And we must.

WIRED Opinion About Rana Novack is a Syrian American advocate for refugees and civilians in conflict and founder of the Refugee Admissions Network Alliance.

Over the past few weeks I have watched along with the rest of the world as the refugee crisis reached a fever pitch in Europe, fueled primarily by the war in Syria, with thousands of desperate refugees breaking the levees established by an international community determined to keep them confined. I watched as they ran across the Hungarian border and resolved to walk 155 miles to Austria where they might have the opportunity to be treated with the compassion and respect they deserve as innocent civilians fleeing years of violence and persecution. As a first-generation Syrian American and advocate for refugees and civilians in conflict, I understand some of the obstacles involved in trying to escape a war. The heartbreak of witnessing my family become refugees and being helpless to stop it is indescribable. The international community must increase accessible, secure pathways to safety for those that seek it—but let’s put aside the fact that of course policy changes could alleviate many of the challenges refugees face. If Policy and Technology were two mischievous children, Technology is who I would be shaking my head at with a disappointed look saying ‘From you, I expected more.’ That’s the thing about innovation—there is no precedent for creativity.

We are in the midst of the largest refugee crisis on record, one that is still growing. The UNHCR estimates that there are approximately 60 million people displaced worldwide with 42,500 newly displaced each day. A migration of comparable magnitude has not been witnessed in 70 years, since the end of World War II. Many things have changed since then—innovation has been infused into nearly every aspect of modern life—with the exception of our response to mass migrations and refugee situations.

Here’s the current model: a conflict erupts, civilians flee, cross a border and become refugees living as transients indefinitely in pop-up tent communities, or become absorbed into cities and towns living as urban refugees. The resulting population influx strains the economic and physical infrastructures of neighboring host countries and tensions rise. Children miss out on years of education. Aid organizations become overwhelmed with even just registering people as refugees, let alone providing them with services and resources.

This is a reactive process devoid of innovation. In no way do I mean to disparage the remarkable work of the aid organizations on the ground. I am suggesting we make their jobs easier. Catastrophes such as these don’t come out of nowhere; they arise from specific sets of circumstances documented over decades. Those circumstances can be analyzed and the predictive models can be built to transform the way we respond to humanitarian disasters. The IT community needs to step up – big time. We have the tools to develop a proactive approach and operate with insight in a world where we have access to incredible amounts of data, yet when a refugee crisis develops and millions flee for their lives, we act as if we had no way of knowing. We watch in horror as innocent children die. And we spend billions of dollars on humanitarian assistance that addresses urgent needs but does nothing to prevent future suffering. We could have seen this coming.

Predictive analytics provides the ability to extract meaningful information from vast amounts of data allowing us to identify patterns and trends, make connections between seemingly unrelated data sets, and predict future outcomes. There are a myriad of predictive analytics tools on the market, both open source and proprietary, and even more applications. Businesses have been able to gain a better understanding of customer behavior and have made tangible, impactful decisions based on that insight: Best Buy changed the layout of their stores in response to customer intelligence data, and Netflix tailors millions of individual viewing profiles and has even made major programming decisions relying on data derived from advanced analytics. In the healthcare industry, Carolinas HealthCare System has implemented analytics solutions to help customize patient care and predict trends in public health. And in emergency management, The Weather Company is using advanced analytics to predict weather patterns and natural disasters with greater accuracy, and furthermore, the potential infrastructure damage resulting from any number of scenarios. For instance, if a weather event were to occur in a particular area, where are the weak points in infrastructure that would be most affected, and how can we best mitigate the damage?

We should be applying those same principles of disaster response and recovery to conflict. Taking into account political and social stability factors, we could conceivably determine the likelihood that there will be a migration to a particular region. What if we had predicted the confluence of events leading to this humanitarian crisis? How might our response have been different?

With the ability to predict trends in migration patterns and understand the behavior of people escaping conflict, we can improve the efficiency of organizations working to support displaced populations and drive strategic policy decisions that impact millions of people. It’s not about substituting decision making, it’s about enabling the most informed, real-time decision making possible. Headlights into this crisis would have allowed aid organizations to prepare for early deployment of life saving resources and a scale up of support to manage an onslaught of registrants. We could have implemented supply chain management strategies to provide them with process and logistics transparency and maximize the efficiency of their operations.

If the governments around the world had a better understanding of the potential of a refugee crisis of this magnitude, predictive modeling would have allowed them to assess and reinforce their infrastructures to support a massive population influx. World leaders could have engaged in informed discussions earlier and developed a contingency plan for resettlement. Perhaps we could have eased the bureaucracy of migration by streamlining processes and ramping up support with personnel and advanced case management tools. Asylum and immigration application and adjudication time frames can range from several months to years. It’s an administratively intensive process that takes time – a luxury civilians in conflict don’t have.

And how about mobile solutions? Refugees are by definition mobile, and their devices have already been proven as life-saving whether they are calling the coast guard from a raft in the Mediterranean or facilitating a reunion with lost family members. Mobile apps have the potential to revolutionize aid resource allocation and relocation support in the humanitarian sector. The possibilities are endless.

The distribution of the global population is shifting and our response to migration crises must shift as well. The IT community must work hand in hand with government agencies and aid organizations around the world to help manage the existing refugee crisis and make sure that next time – and there will be a next time – we are prepared to do things better. Let’s use the tools we have, make the data available, and allow innovation to influence policy. We have the capabilities and an urgent need for a solution. More importantly, we have an obligation to use technology in a globally responsible manner and to do so in such a way that, if possible, lessens the suffering of others and saves a single child from dying on the beach.