July 2020 Mining Clinical Data

Today’s BIG Idea is a project I worked on for a urology group last week.  They asked to mine their data to find patients who qualified for a clinical trial, but the approach we used can help practices with or without clinical trials.  Listen for how we defined Yes/No columns to search for, such as whether or not the patient had ever had a TURP or prostate cancer.  We used procedure and diagnosis codes to define the columns, but you could also use lists of problems, medications, or orders to do a similar analysis.  The end user can simply filter the Yes/No columns in an Excel table to define the patients to search for.  You can take a similar approach in marketing.  The example in the podcast is a dermatology practice looking for patients to cross-market to.  Once you have built a tool to analyze clinical data, you can use this tool repeatedly to find patients, whether for marketing or for a clinical trial.  I hope this BIG idea helps your practice find the patients you are looking for.