Mining Health Data for Clinical Decision Support, Enhanced Efficiency in Healthcare Delivery, and New Products

在世界范围内，提供医疗保健的成本和复杂性正在迅速上升，部分原因是人类寿命的延长、慢性病和传染病的普遍存在、监管和管理开销的扩大以及整个系统的效率低下。医疗生态系统的日益复杂，以及各级利益相关者（包括患者、保险公司和政府）对更好的物有所值、更高的护理质量和更好的临床结果的期望，加剧了成本压力。记录保存、遵从性和法规要求意味着医疗保健行业中的组织在历史上产生了大量数据。这些参与者逐渐意识到，他们积累的“大数据”可能会帮助他们克服医疗保健服务的挑战，但不确定如何做到这一点。与合作伙伴的讨论揭示了以下三个差距：(i)管理层理解遗留数据具有内在价值，但不知道如何以新见解、产品和服务的形式释放这种价值；（ii）遗留数据通常是在数年或数十年内捕获的，通常存储在多个不同的异构数据库中，这使得组织和挖掘这些数据变得困难；（三）普遍缺乏训练有素的数据分析师来应对这些挑战，而且聘请他们的成本很高。因此，当与健康相关的公司在其历史数据中寻找价值时，它们面临着三种一般业务需求——知识、技术能力和熟练劳动力。考虑到这些需求，我们建议利用我们在数据分析方面的专业知识，挖掘加拿大健康相关公司积累的大型历史数据集的潜在价值。（数据分析是计划、获取、管理、转换和建模数据的过程，其目标是发现隐藏的模式、提供结论和支持决策。）这种价值将以临床决策支持、提高运营效率以及新的数据驱动产品和服务的形式出现。我们的合作伙伴包括：Harris Healthcare（一家为医疗保健提供商提供软件服务的初创企业）；HeadCheck Health，为体育联盟提供端到端脑震荡协议管理工具的提供商；Prizm Media，北美首屈一指的医疗领先一代公司之一；以及总部位于多伦多的Springboard诊所，该诊所专注于治疗所有年龄段的人的注意力缺陷多动症。

Worldwide, the costs and complexity of delivering healthcare are escalating rapidly, driven in part by longer human lifespans, the pervasiveness of chronic illnesses and infectious diseases, expanding regulatory and administrative overhead, and system-wide inefficiencies. Cost pressures are exacerbated by the growing convolution of the medical ecosystem and by expectations of better value-for-money, improved quality of care, and enhanced clinical outcomes by stakeholders at all levels, including patients, insurers, and governments. Record-keeping, compliance, and regulatory requirements have meant that organizations within the healthcare industry have historically generated huge quantities of data. These players are becoming aware that their accumulated "big data" may help them to overcome the challenges of healthcare delivery, but are not sure how.Discussions with our partners have revealed the following three gaps: (i) management understands that legacy data has inherent value, but does not know how to unlock that value in terms of new insights, products, and services; (ii) legacy data, typically captured over years or decades, is very often stored across multiple, disparate, heterogeneous databases which makes organizing and mining it difficult; and (iii) there is a pervasive lack of well-trained data analysts to tackle these challenges, and they are expensive to hire. There are therefore three general business needs facing health-related firms as they look for value in their historical data - for knowledge, technical capability, and skilled labour.With these needs in mind, we propose to leverage our expertise in Data Analytics to unlock latent value in large, historical datasets accumulated by Canadian health-related firms. (Data analytics is the process of planning for, acquiring, managing, transforming, and modelling data with the goal of discovering hidden patterns, informing conclusions, and supporting decision-making.) This value will take the form of clinical decision support, enhanced operational efficiency, and new data-driven products and services.Our partners are: Harris Healthcare, a start-up offering software services to healthcare providers; HeadCheck Health, a provider of end-to-end concussion protocol management tools for sports leagues; Prizm Media, one of North America's premier medical lead generation companies; and Springboard Clinic, a Toronto-based mental health provider focussed on treating ADHD in people of all ages.