New Report: Call for President Obama Urged to ‘Remove Public Veil of Ignorance’ Around State of US Health

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From the 29 August 2013 Science Daily article

In a call to action on the sorry comparative state of U.S. health, researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health are urging President Obama to “remove the public veil of ignorance” and confront a pressing question: Why is America at the bottom? The report, published in the journal Science, appeals to the President to mobilize government to create a National Commission on the Health of Americans. The researchers underscore the importance of this effort in order for the country to begin reversing the decline in the comparative status of U.S. health, which has been four decades in the making.

This is not a challenge that can be left to private groups, no matter how well meaning. Drs. Ronald Bayer and Amy Fairchild, both Professors of Sociomedical Sciences, argue, “The health status of Americans is a social problem that demands social solutions.” More is at stake than the U.S. healthcare system, which fails to provide needed care to millions of Americans. “There is a need for bold public policies that move beyond individual behavior to address the fundamental causes of disease,” Bayer and Fairchild conclude.

A January 2013 report by the U.S. National Research Council (NRC) and Institute of Medicine (IOM) ranks the United States last among peer nations in health status and compares it unfavorably to 17 peer countries at almost every stage of the life course. The report, titled “U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health,” emphasizes that socioeconomic causes are the drivers of these outcomes and details the categories in which the U.S. has the worst or next-to-worst results:

• The U.S. has higher rates of adverse birth outcomes, heart disease, injuries from motor vehicle accidents and violence, sexually acquired diseases, and chronic lung disease.
• Americans lose more years of life to alcohol and other drugs.
• The U.S. has the highest rate of infant mortality among high-income countries.
• The U.S. has the second highest incidence of AIDS and ischemic heart disease,
• For decades, the U.S. has experienced the highest rates of obesity in children and adults as well as diabetes from age 20 and up.

Read the entire article here

Related articles

• Call for President Obama to ‘remove public veil of ignorance’ around state of US health (eurekalert.org)

Better medicine, brought to you by big data through new types of data analysis

 

A good overview of how improved data analysis and presentation is improving health care delivery.

I especially liked the slideshare presentation found below in Related Articles.
The 42 slides in Big data – a brief overview outlines what big data is, its sources and processes, how it is analyzed, current “players”,examples, market analysis, future, and opportunities.

From the 15 July 2012 blog post at Gigaom

Slowly but surely, health care is becoming a killer app for big data. Whether it’s Hadoop, machine learning, natural-language processing or some other technique, folks in the worlds of medicine and hospital administration understand that new types of data analysis are the key to helping them take their fields to the next level.

Here are some of the interesting use cases we’ve written about over the past year or so, and a few others I’ve just come across recently. If you have a cool one — or a suggestion for a new use of big data within the healthcare space — share it in the comments:

Genomics. This is the epitomic case for big data and health care. Genome sequencing isgetting cheaper by the day and produces mountains of data. Companies such asDNAnexus, Bina Technologies, Appistry and NextBio want to make analyzing that data to discover cures for diseases faster, easier and cheaper than ever using lots cutting-edge algorithms and lots of cloud computing cores.

BI[definition of business intelligence] for doctors. Doctors and staff at Seattle Children’s Hospital are using Tableau to analyze and visualize terabytes of data dispersed across the institution’s servers and databases. Not only does visualizing the data help reduce medical errors and help the hospital plan trials but, as of this time last year, its focus on data had saved the hospital $3 million on supply chain costs….

..Semantic search. Imagine you’re a doctor trying to learn about a new patient or figure out who among your patients might benenfit from a new technique. But patient records have been scattered throughout departments, vary in format and, perhaps worst of all, all use the ontologies of the department that created the record. A startup called Apixio is trying to fix this by centralizing records in the cloud and applying semantic analysis to uncover everything doctors need, regardless who wrote it…

..Getting ahead of disease. It’s always good if you figure out how to diagnose diseases early without expensive tests, and that’s just what Seton Healthcare was able to dothanks to its big data efforts…

and more!

Related articles

• Better medicine, brought to you by big data [GigaOM] (gigaom.com)
• Intel and NextBio seek Big Data upgrades in genomics (fiercebiotechit.com)
• Big Changes Are Ahead For The Health Care Industry, Courtesy Of Big Data (fastcompany.com)

• Big data – a brief overview (slideshare.net) [a slide presentation, 42 slides]

• Oracle adopts the popular R language for the enterprise and big data. (oracle.com)
• Presentation: Scalability Challenges in Big Data Science (architects.dzone.com)
• Salesforce intros Radian6 Insights for social big data (zdnet.com)
• Big Data Modeling – Part I – Defining “Big Data” and “Data Modeling” (infocus.emc.com)
• NextBio and Intel Announce Collaboration to Optimize Use of Hadoop Stack And Move Forward With Big Data Technologies in Genomics (ducknetweb.blogspot.com)
• A Beautiful Friendship: Big Data and Social Media (blogs.sap.com)
• Stanford rides Big Data wave in medical research (fiercebiotechit.com)
• Big Data? Big Deal! (clean-clouds.com)

New Statistical Model Developed To Predict Future Medical Conditions

Please remember, just because something is predicted doesn’t mean it is going to happen!

Still, this seems to be a good “tool”.

 

From the 6 June 2012 article at Medical News Today

Analyzing medical records from thousands of patients, statisticians have devised a statistical model for predicting what other medical problems a patient might encounter.

Like how Netflix recommends movies and TV shows or how Amazon.com suggests products to buy, the algorithm makes predictions based on what a patient has already experienced as well as the experiences of other patients showing a similar medical history.

“This provides physicians with insights on what might be coming next for a patient, based on experiences of other patients. It also gives a predication that is interpretable by patients,” said Tyler McCormick, an assistant professor of statistics and sociology at the University of Washington.

The algorithm will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Annals of Applied Statistics. McCormick’s co-authors are Cynthia Rudin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and David Madigan, Columbia University.

McCormick said that this is one of the first times that this type of predictive algorithm has been used in a medical setting. What differentiates his model from others, he said, is that it shares information across patients who have similar health problems. This allows for better predictions when details of a patient’s medical history are sparse.

Related articles

• New statistical model lets patient’s past forecast future ailments (esciencenews.com)
• Algorithm Predicts Future Medical Conditions – Works Somewhat Like Netflix Based on Patient and Other Patient Experiences – Good for Clinical Arena and Words of Caution With Potential “For Profit” Utilization (ducknetweb.blogspot.com)
• Beware of False Positives (infocus.emc.com)
• False Positive Science: Why We Can’t Predict the Future (freakonomics.com)