Learn how to analyze health data / Reinvent yourself in the workplace
Advances in computing power and in machine learning techniques are rapidly changing how humans utilize data. Aside from the core statistical issues, what are the questions that an analyst needs to consider when doing predictive modeling in practice? This post describes a few of these practical considerations. I like to use the 5 Ws to … Continue reading Practical considerations for Predictive Modeling
In this post, I describe risk adjustment, an important tool in health analytics. I’ll cover what it is, how it is used, how it is done and how well it performs. What it is In the sport of boxing, matches are held between two boxers of the same weight class and gender. A match would … Continue reading Risk Adjustment 101
In this post I describe how I would go about using health analytics to identify patients most at risk of an opioid overdose. The Facts In 2016, there were 42,249 deaths in the US that involved opioids. That equates to a 13.3/100,000 mortality rate, and approx. one opioid related death every 10 minutes! By the time … Continue reading On Opioids and Analytics
This is the fourth post in a series in which I describe the common types of healthcare data you will come across, namely, diagnoses, procedures, demographic, drug, laboratory result data, clinical notes and financial data. A quick recap previous posts: Diagnosis codes, such as ICD9 and ICD10s, record the REASON for a visit to a … Continue reading What’s blood got to do with it – LOINC!
As mentioned before, I'm not a fan of using advanced analytic techniques for the sake of intellectual pursuits. I'm a HUGE fan of asking good questions, framing analysis well, knowing data well, quickly arriving at actionable insights. A trained data scientist's toolbox has many statistical techniques, each of which has strengths and weaknesses. A health … Continue reading Decision Trees – intro
