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Algorithm Contest Aims To Predict Health Problems
databuff writes "The April 4 launch of the $3 million Heritage Health Prize has been announced by the Heritage Provider Network, a network of doctors. The competition challenges data hackers to build algorithms that predict who will go to the hospital in the next year, so that preventative action can be taken. An algorithm might find that somebody with diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol is a 90 per cent risk for hospitalization. Knowing this, it might be cheaper for an HMO to enroll them in an exercise program now rather than pay the likely hospital bill. The competition takes the same approach as the $1 million Netflix Prize, but solves a far more significant problem."
Just label them as a 'High Risk Candidate' and jack up their premiums 2-3x so they can no longer afford healthcare by the point at which they need service :P
That's likely what will happen, but not necessarily the only result.
To lower company premiums, Safeway bribes employees to quit smoking and/or lose weight:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124476804026308603.html
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Oh come on, I know some Sumo Wrestlers that are in great shape!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
"Knowing this, it might be cheaper for an HMO to enroll them in an exercise program" OR DROP THEIR COVERAGE!
And this is different from how your current insurance provider treats you now? "You smoke? Extra fee. You ever have cancer? Extra fee".
The only people I've ever run into who have a problem with "ObamaCare" are ignorant assholes (and republicans, but they're in the same group).
Contest judge,"Why I'm perfectly healthy, why would you pick me?"
Fat Tony: *punch to the face of contest judge*
Contest judge,"Well I see your point, but that isn't exactly going to send me to the hospital."
Fat Tony: *draws a gun*
Contest Judge,"Ok ok, I'll go to the hospital, here's your money."
Fat Tony,"Who says I want your money?"
God spoke to me.
the data is not centralized
Actually a solid argument could be made that the data is centralized, you just don't have access to it because your insurance company makes more money by not allowing you to access it. Insurance companies have plenty of centralized data on plenty of people in this country; enough to make very solid models - particularly models for the types of people that the insurance companies are most concerned about.
If you could get the data from just one big insurance company or HMO - like perhaps the one that is advertising on this story - you could get plenty of data to build your algorithm. You just have to convince them that you are worthy of access to it (even if it has the personal identifiers removed).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The original meaning of 'to hack' was 'to do something clever'.
So a "Computer Hacker" is "A person who knows how to do something clever with a computer". A data hacker would be something like that.
Then the media misunderstood Hacker culture and now Hacker == Cracker in their ontology
Very few medical conditions are caused purely by lifestyle choices. Genetics play a big role. Many catastrophic expenses are due to catastrophic events, like car accidents. Even HIV is not always caused by life style choices -- millions of babies are born with it, and there is no way of determining whether a health care worker contracted it because of their job or because of their choice of sex partners.
That being said, I agree with you in principle. Public health care should be targeted at prevention and diagnostics. Catastrophic health care should be covered by insurance; if you don't pay for insurance, you're out of luck. That still doesn't change the fact that 90% of most people's health care expenses are incurred in the last 5 months of their lives, but cutting off funding for that would amount to a real version of the "death panels" the Republicans have falsely associated with the new Health Care act. Health insurance is so expensive because we simply refuse to let people die in peace.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I love the reform haters. Here is a little story that happened to me: I found a lump near my booty hole. I am only 28, so that is pretty scary. I went to get it checked out for cancer. I had a colonoscopy (you know, what you get when you are 50). Well it cleaned out my system good enough for my gall stones to spout up and hurt alot. Remember, I am 28 and am in decent health. Within a 2 week span, I went to the doctor, had a colonscopy, went to the emergency room, had my gall bladder removed, then was bed ridden in the hospital for 5 days.
I got out on a Thursday, went back to work on the following Monday. I had to. How else am I going to pay for this? I am still making payments on it.
Maybe I wiped too hard or something, but that chain of events, then me going back to work so soon, yeah, not good. Now under what you call "ObamaCare" I would not still be paying this because once I had my colonscopy, guess what, even with a clean record of good health before this, they jacked my premiums through the roof.
Oh wait, urgent delivery:
Dear person who does not support the Health Care Reform,
We regret to inform you that we thought it would be a great idea to jack up your premiums making excuses for it. Even if the health reform is not even in place, we are going to go ahead and use that as an excuse to boost your premiums up. Also, please be aware that once you have insurance through us, if you have a salary job, regardless of what you go to the doctor for, we will go ahead and boost your premiums again.
Thank You again for supporting us and Being Republican,
Big Insurance Company
The world is how you make it
You've never enrolled in insurance have you? They don't ask this for employer-provided insurance, since that's a different kind of coverage (where they have models for the type of employees that employer tends to employ, etc). For those cases, they rely on the principles insurance is suppose to rely on, for individual buyers, they give you an anal probe and only enroll you if you are not likely to need their services.
Dear Non-Obama Health Care Customer
We have identified you as a high risk patient.
Good bye.
"In a way, doctors are trained to ignore teh science. They start with someone who already has a problem, and treat the symptoms as best they can. Science has determined many of the causes, but they are not profitable for the oligarchy, so they train our doctors to sell us pills for the symptoms"
that is completely false. While may Dr.s are not scientists, they still prefer to cure someone. It's a lie perpetrated by people whose own 'belief' aren't born out scientifically. Since they are so attached to them they invoke conspiracy that are nonsense.
"The Lipid Peroxidation [wikipedia.org] chain reaction is a large part of what causes the diabetes, hypertension and [oxidized] cholesterol problems.":
That is complete nonsense.
speaking of doctors and science:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This problem will be solved shortly when Medicare melts down. Then people will get exactly as much end of life care as they can afford and no more.
Which, in the end, is how it should have been done from the beginning. When there aren't enough resources to give everybody what they want then some kind of rationing will occur no matter how much people complain and protest about it. The only decision to make is whether to have rationing by price or rationing by fiat. Rationing by price is the superior solution because then market forces will provide incentives to bring the costs down to increase the number of potential customers. Rationing by fiat puts everybody at the mercy of unelected bureaucrats.
To see how this works compare the prices of procedures that people normally pay out of pocket vs procedures that people normally pay for with OPM. Laser eye surgery has been getting cheaper over the years. Anything covered by Medicare or private health insurance has been getting more expensive.
Get with the times will you, this is Web 2.0!
(Old name) --> (New name)
Webmonkey --> Application programmer
Programmer --> Hacker
Hacker --> Terrorist
While may Dr.s are not scientists, they still prefer to cure someone.
Of course, but their training is deficient. If you spend years learning the minutia of pharmacology and surgery, it's easy to "miss the forest for the trees". If your doctor's training only gives a cursory overview of the role of nutrition, AND the conventional wisdom about certain nutritional concepts is wrong (e.g. saturated fats were vilified so A.D.M. can make billions selling seed oils), your doctor is going to be biased for the things that he spent the majority of his training learning about.
That is complete nonsense.
Are you defending the mass consumption of rancid oils? I think you are. All "vegetable" oils are deodorized as a part of the production process.
It's hard to exclude oxygen from a biological system. Which leaves antioxidants, and it takes a lot of antioxidants to deal with the massive quantities of polyunsaturated oils in a person's weekly servings of A.D.M. soybean-oil-based Kraft salad dressing.
Your tone was pretty rude, so I'm going to have to refer you to my response to the anonymous poster, who politely asked for a substantiating link for the health claims.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
uhh, the health care incentives that are part of ARRA will have moved nearly the entire health system to a completely electronic patient record that has the ability to share data between providers by 2016. I say nearly only because I am sure some providers will not be able to meet the incentives deadline and will start getting penalized for not being there, but with in a few years of the deadline, everyone will have gotten there.
In most of the country they make you fill out an extensive questionnaire. Around here it's pretty complicated and is designed to flunk ~10% of the applicants into the high risk pool. Which sounds bad, but up until now it was the only way that the state could guarantee that everybody could get access to health insurance. Previously some people couldn't get coverage no matter how much they were willing to pay. Now they just have to figure out where to get the money, which is not easy to do with the high risk pool.
By my algorithm you'd be forced to get another doctor that wasn't a waster or pay more. Okay, maybe it's simple, but it is effective which I can prove with personal experience.
Here's the algorithm:
If ((you can pass your doctor on the street) && (they don't recognize you)){
you = in trouble;
}else{
you = good;
}
Here's the anecdotal proof:
A few years ago life seemed to be really coming together. Happily married, just bought my favorite house in the area, was coding like a rock star and arguably the healthiest person in the office. Didn't smoke, drink or eat restaurant food. Also, was riding my bike 100 k / day round trip to work and getting really into carving out a perfect life putting one good day in after the next.
Like you, my doctor was a tosser but I figured, I'm fine.
A cold snap before Thanksgiving caught me off guard and got a slight chill. No big deal. But spent the long holiday in bed and went to see my doctor on Monday. He hardly looked at me, not tests just said I had strep gave me a mega dose of antibiotics and a note for my boss.
Swell. My neck it did. The pills did nothing. Called and to get another appointment. But just got more pills. I was feeling like crap. Felt like my doctor's nurse wasn't even relaying my messages. It was futile to rely on him so I went into the walk in clinic and saw a physician's assistant. He walked in and saw right away what was what. I saw it register in his eye the second he walked in the exam room after which he just blurted out he could see I had lymphoma. He had to back pedal a bit. Protocol and all. But arranged to have me see a doctor that afternoon.
Went home for lunch and they called from the hospital to see if I could come in sooner. So that could be another calculation, if you wait less time to be seen your fucked. Scratch that, they'll use that as an excuse to extend waiting.
Soon I was diagnosed Stage 4B. They don't say terminal any more. And why should they, you've gotta enough to deal with surgeries. Well they could have done em all at once because my surgeon could see what needed to be done but that's not approved by my apparently top notch insurance.
It just seemed so unreal. One day I'm making back of the envelope calculations from the numbers out of my Garmin that if I kept at it and focused I could be competitive enough to ride the pursuit in the next Olympics in London and then it turns out I just had an unnaturally high red blood cell count that any pro cyclist would covet because I had cancer. Did working out help me? I'd like to think so. Like to think maybe my training didn't get me to the Olympics but allowed me to survive. But maybe it did me in. My fat smoking sister didn't get cancer.
Another data you could use but would require surveillence to gather would be the number of doctors, nurses, cleaning ladies and orderlies who sublty as John Cleese wink wink nudge nudge advise you to not use more than one dose of Fentalyn patch as two would kill you, that's an indication that you might soon cease to be.
Another good data point they might want to focus on is the coincidence of spending a month in isolation because you've got like zero white blood cells and corresponding occurences for getting written up for tasks you failed to complete while on disability. Getting fired for taking too many sick days would be a potential data point to calculate in the algorithm as well.
Here's the thing. What ever happened to duty? I must have been focusing on doing my job and missed it but at some point the word lost meaning and worse is now the new euphamism for #2. I mean what kind of business model is it that puts the burden of performance on the customer? I had never heard of fentalyn before, but suspect that so many people know what it is is because they are as high as the arrogant shites who would abrocate responsibility to fluff up their bottom line long tail be damned.
So maybe my anecd