California Healthcare Provider Wants Illness-Predicting Algorithm

alphadogg writes "The Heritage Provider Network wants to do for healthcare what technology in the film Minority Report did for police work. In other words, it wants to use technology to pre-emptively predict when illness is likely to strike and take measures to prevent costly hospitalizations. This week Heritage announced that it was offering a prize of $3 million for any developer who successfully created a 'breakthrough algorithm that uses available patient data, including health records and claims data, to predict and prevent unnecessary hospitalizations.'"

Comments

The Actual Problem in Pursuing this Prize

[sarbonn]

As a healthcare professional who does data analysis for a number of hospitals, this sounds like a great idea, but at the same time I also realize the limitations of conducting this algorithm process. To begin with, HIPAA compliance laws make it very difficult to share specific data about patients, which means someone trying to put together this type of information, or statistical based program process, is going to have to do it sans data, creating false data that isn't actually real case information. Which then means that even if you are capable of providing an algorithm that fulfills the functionality, the designers of the prize program are most likely going to stand up and say that it's not transferrable to real cases because you didn't account for the specific variables that are present in real world data (meaning you can't predict data that is actually already there due to the amount of errors in guesswork involved). If they made available the actual data they want extracted, this might be a possible process. But until they do, it is like guessing statistical outcomes of a presidential race without knowing anything about the people who might be actually running.