Dive Brief:
- Montefiore Medical Center has invested in a semantic data lake as the basis for its predictive analytics pilot program, according to a Health IT Analytics report.
- The program's algorithm flags any hospitalized patient at the health system's locations who are at risk of death or in need of intubation within the following 48 hours - the time window available for an effective intervention - and creates risk scores through the use of the semantic data lake delivering real-time patient data.
- CMS stated in a blog post last week that its Medicare's predictive analytics technology - Fraud Prevention System (FPS) - helped save more than $1 billion in 2014 and 2015.
Dive Insight:
Then the risk scores are combined with other factors to provide a personalized list of proposed interventions to the physician caring for that patient.
Dr. Parsa Mirhaji, associate professor of systems and computational biology and director of clinical research informatics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Montefiore Medical Center-Institute for Clinical Translational Research, said Montefiore is collaborating with the Mayo Clinic to develop a predictive algorithm based on retrospective data from 68,000 patients from both locations, Health IT Analytics reports.
The pilot program is in the pre-clinical validation stage so the algorithm is being tested but clinicians are not being notified about their patients. Results are being reviewed by investigators who compare the predictive analytics with real patient care procedures to assess the system's accuracy. So far, investigators are happy with the results, which have assisted in locating almost all high-risk patients with only a 1% error, Dr. Mirhaji said.
Semantic computing is based on the concept that computers can learn to solve problems in ways similar to humans, according to Health IT Analytics. This process links together natural language concepts that enables the computer to make inferences about data sets that are not pre-coded into the system, which, in turn, can be used to assign risk scores to patients, as in Dr. Mirhaji's study.
A Montefiore employee was indicted last summer on charges related to stealing personal information from 12,000 patients. Early this year, the health system announced its partnership with St. Luke's Cornwall Hospital had been approved by state and federal agencies.