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

Well with the stupid rules in place

[Shivetya]

especially with the nationwide health care bill what did you expect?

The system will allow people to forgo insurance until they are sick. This is akin to crashing your car and then buying insurance and filing a claim. As such, insurance companies need to come up with methods to better manage those they are covering to buffer against those who will abuse the system.

The real problem of course is, people have no incentive to care about their health. Oh, I know, but you say, who doesn't care about their health. Its a matter of degrees. Tell me how many tubbies you know who think they need to change. OK, now tell me how many are doing something about it. When health care's cost do not directly affect the people using it a large number will do nothing to improve their health. They already have been forgiven the responsibility of paying for their health care and quickly associate that with, if anything goes wrong they won't have to pay for that either. Hence the costs are purposely forced upon those who do pay and the companies managing it. Its a perfect system designed to force people out of private insurance for the exact fear you espouse.

So time to break out the predictions. It should not be too hard to get a few things down quickly, there are issues that are attributable based on race, sex, and known health issues (weight, smoking, etc), then compare to results from actual visits if any. It would be a fascinating project. I don't know why anyone is surprised by any of this, my only surprise is that these are not common place now.

Ask yourself this : Why should someone pay for your healthcare if your not an active participant in improving your own health. Then realize that a sizable portion will tell you to go F off all the while not screwing over themselves by not doing anything or worse doing the wrong things.