About Predictive Healthcare

Clinicians must rely on their reasoning, experience and bias to respond quickly to patient healthcare needs. They can pull relevant threads with stunning accuracy to change the outcome for a patient. However, recent advancements in data capture, storage, and rampant use of various devices have led to an explosion of data in terms of complexity, volume and speed. There are millions of patient signals and reams of administrative data that fall on the floor because humans can’t filter the noise, speed, and variety of the data. Here at Penn Medicine, the Penn Medicine Predictive Healthcare team is creating computational solutions to pull those hidden relationships from the noise.

Representing a combination of technical skill and dedication to enhancing health, Penn Medicine’s Predictive Healthcare Team helps clinicians and researchers expand the ways patient information and research data are transmitted and used.

Healthcare, like other business areas, use Data Analysts or Business Intelligence to provide insight into the effectiveness of business processes. This analysis, in turn, provides strategic decision support to business leaders.

However, if the business expert does not know how to explore or resolve a problem they can’t guide the data analysts to report on the effectiveness.

The advent of cheap data storage, processing power, and open source software projects has provided the foundation for the application of advanced algorithms (modern signal processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence) to solve general business problems.

By combining advanced algorithms with mountains of data, fused from disparate sources from inside and beyond the enterprise, it is now possible to discover previously unseen patterns and connections. To advance core business objectives, these newly discovered connections can drive decision-making and behavioral change through real-time predictive applications.

Taken together, these advances are providing new insights and solutions to core problems in the business of healthcare - solutions that traditional analysts and the decision makers who guide them never knew to explore. This new application of technology is what we do at Penn Medicine Predictive Healthcare.