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Showing posts from January, 2019

Why the success of predictive analytics in healthcare is hard to predict

In one of my visits to the hospital where our EHR system was being deployed the chief doctor turned to me and said: "My experience allows me to predict exactly what will be the patient's condition in the next few hours just by glancing at him, however, I am not able to pass this skill to my young doctors. What I need from you, software engineering people is to help me solve that problem". That sounded to me like a classic problem for computers to crack and bring value: to “connect the dots” between so many unrelated data points simultaneously in real time, in order to detect small anomalies indicating that a patient begins to fail, elusive even from a careful human observer. The year was 1998 and although predictive analytic has been a hot topic over the years and the vast improvement in computational power, predictive analytic products are not widely being used by health delivery organizations and are still being considered by many as gadgets. Treatment decisions