How data scientists are improving care by learning how to learn

Following the success of Palliative Connect, a collaboration between a data science team and Penn Medicine clinicians, specialists finalized four principles to guide practitioners across the health care landscape to apply data science, machine learning, and digital tools to improve care. The principles were presented at the first annual Informatics Day hosted by the Penn Institute for Bioinformatics on May 31.

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Palliative Connect employed predictive analytics to coordinate between palliative care specialists and a patient’s primary care provider, and grew from a small pilot into clinical practice at two of Penn Medicine’s hospitals with considerable success.

“We’re creating the playbook for building these systems,” said Michael Draugelis, chief data scientist at Penn Medicine.

From finding the right problem to predicting something existing systems aren’t meant to change, the principles presented this spring create systems for problem-solving and also dictate how to learn from future projects.

Read more at Penn Medicine News