How Health Care Analytics Improves Patient Care
The power of health care analytics is exemplified in real patient scenarios every day. Here are just some of the many ways it has recently been used in health care practices.
Streamlining PTSD diagnosis
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) impacts nearly 8 million Americans, but reaching that diagnosis and beginning life-changing treatment can be a time-consuming process; and time, unfortunately, is not something many PTSD sufferers have to waste. Using machine learning, some physicians have been able to streamline the diagnosis process by eliminating some of the screening questions.
A team from the VA Boston Healthcare System and the Boston University School of Public Health built a machine learning model that learned how effectively different terms and questions in the diagnostic process accurately predicted PTSD diagnosis. This enabled the team to identify which items had weak associations and could be cut, while maintaining at least 96% accuracy.
