Health data mining collaboration

Deakin University has signed an MOU with Max Healthcare to develop a project that will focus on data analytics for healthcare management in India.

Max Healthcare runs 10 hospital branches in India, of which eight are in the National Capital Region (NCR).

In what will be a "first of its kind” venture, both partners will put "big data" to work across a large array of medical records - including admissions, diagnosis and computerised registries - with the aim of identifying critical safety issues and assisting clinical efficiencies.

The Director of Deakin's Pattern Recognition and Data Analytics Strategic Research Centre, Professor Svetha Venkatesh explained that the outcomes are critically important, from economic, patient safety and systems perspectives. The immediate project will focus on heart disease, specifically on patients with symptoms of Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI) or stroke.

"The primary objective of the report will be to search through the existing data sets for hidden patterns of both the predictable and preventable events in managing the healthcare of individuals," said Professor Venkatesh.

"This will be done by building sophisticated predictive models, utilising machine learning techniques derived from anonymised hospital patient records from diverse hospital data sources. This paradigm is novel, since it is capable of both hypothesis generation and testing, whilst being agnostic and unbiased from prior assumptions."

Professor Venkatesh is optimistic that the model will prove useful for managing other health issues and could improve general hospital healthcare practices in India.

The resultant model will be jointly held and shared by the teams at Deakin University and Max Healthcare, as a prototype program. Once successful, the model would be subsequently piloted at Max Healthcare on prospective cases over a one-year period and the predictive accuracy will be calculated and shared with Deakin.