Predictive Analytics in Healthcare
Data Is Making Health Care Clairvoyant
Pamela Peele, PhD, one of the keynote speakers at the IAPA National Conference 2020, wants to get patients out of emergency rooms.
And she’s relying on vast amounts of data and advanced analytics to do it.
As chief analytics officer of both the UPMC Health Plan and UPMC Enterprises, Dr. Peele is blending her expertise in economics, game theory, and clinical health care to develop predictive models that will prompt medical staff to intervene – proactively – with those patients who are most likely to require emergency room treatment.
“If we can predict which patients have the highest probability of requiring service in an emergency room or urgent care clinic, we can reach out to help them before that happens,” explains Dr. Peele, who early in her career spent 13 years as a neurodiagnostic lab technician.
Using predictive analytics to identify at-risk patients is one of many projects UPMC has undertaken that make use of the enormous quantities of patient and consumer data at its disposal.
The overarching goal? To completely transform the patient experience by leveraging Big Data.