Developing and Implementing Predictive Models in a Learning Healthcare System: Traditional and Artificial Intelligence Approaches in the Veterans Health Administration.

Journal: Annual review of biomedical data science
PMID:

Abstract

Predicting clinical risk is an important part of healthcare and can inform decisions about treatments, preventive interventions, and provision of extra services. The field of predictive models has been revolutionized over the past two decades by electronic health record data; the ability to link such data with other demographic, socioeconomic, and geographic information; the availability of high-capacity computing; and new machine learning and artificial intelligence methods for extracting insights from complex datasets. These advances have produced a new generation of computerized predictive models, but debate continues about their development, reporting, validation, evaluation, and implementation. In this review we reflect on more than 10 years of experience at the Veterans Health Administration, the largest integrated healthcare system in the United States, in developing, testing, and implementing such models at scale. We report lessons from the implementation of national risk prediction models and suggest an agenda for research.

Authors

  • David Atkins
    Lyssn, Seattle, WA.
  • Christos A Makridis
    National Artificial Intelligence Institute at the Department of Veterans Affairs, US Department of Veterans Affairs, Washington, District of Columbia, USA christos.makridis@va.gov.
  • Gil Alterovitz
    Center for Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA; Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA; Children׳s Hospital Informatics Program at the Harvard/MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Boston, USA. Electronic address: gil_alterovitz@hms.harvard.edu.
  • Rachel Ramoni
    Office of Research and Development, Department of Veterans Affairs, Washington, DC, USA; email: david.atkins@va.gov.
  • Carolyn Clancy
    Office of Discovery, Education and Affiliate Networks, Department of Veterans Affairs, Washington, DC, USA.