I had the opportunity to attend the MegaPAW - Predictive Analytics World in Las Vegas on June 5 and 6th.  My focus was on the Healthcare sessions.  I noted the following:

Emergence of Natural Language Processing (NLP )

Not to say NLP is new, buts its importance as a source of insights for Healthcare is growing.  Doctors and nurses notes contain valuable information, but specialized medical terminology, a lack of universal shorthand and a variety of spellings creates some challenges for NLP in healthcare. Word2Vec has provided a great baseline for NLP, but applying it to Healthcare requires additional work. Presentations that addressed the subject:

• Increasing Clinical Visibility with Natural Language Processing - Chris Franciskovich and Jason Weinberg - OSF Healthcare System
  
  
• Natural Language Understanding in Healthcare: State of the Art NLP, Machine Learning & Deep Learning with Open Source Software - David Talby - Pacific AI
• Using Machine Learning to Detect Errors in Medical Data - Tommy Blanchard - Fresenius Medical Care North America

Continued Need to Reducing Hospitalizations

It may seem counter-intuitive that a business wants to reduce its customer usage, but that is the case for Hospital admissions and readmissions. Machine Learning and other techniques are bringing in clinical, demographic and social determinants into predictive models to score patients at risk of readmission. From that score, interventions can be executed to reduce the need for readmission. Talks on this subject included our sister company diwo and others:

• From When You Arrive to After You Leave: Integrating Predictive Models into a Cross Continuum Heat Map to Inform Care Coordination and Reduce Readmissions - Ben Cleveland and Rhiannon Harms - UnityPoint Health
• A Sixth Sense Working With You to Make Smarter Decisions? Ask diwo - A Cognitive Decision Making Platform - Gaurav Johari - diwo
• Reducing Hospitalization with Predictive Modeling in Patients with Kidney Failure - Andrew Long and Len Usvyat - Fresenius Medical Care North America

We Are at the Beginning of the Beginning

This is the fifth year for PAW Healthcare but we are just scratching the surface of the benefits analytics can bring to healthcare.  Analytics drives all the main goals of healthcare:

• Better Outcomes
• Reduced Risks
• Lower Costs
• Increased Revenue

Congratulations to Eric Siegel, Chair of PAW and Jeff Deal, Chair of PAW Healthcare for another conference.  I look forward to next year.