Becker's Hospital Review

36 DATA ANALYTICS & INFORMATICS CDC looking to Reddit, Twitter activity to forecast suicide rate By Andrea Park R esearchers from the CDC and Atlanta-based Georgia Institute of Technology are feeding data from social media platforms into artificial intelligence algorithms in an attempt to calculate more up-to-date national suicide statistics, Recode reported. Suicide rates are currently derived from a national database of each state's cause-of- death reports. While accurate, that infor- mation can take up to two years to compile, leading officials and government agencies to allot resources and dra policies based on somewhat outdated statistics. e researchers are therefore using machine learning AI to analyze health data, such as that gathered by crisis text and call lines, and content from platforms such as Reddit and Twitter to formulate a more accurate forecast of the real-time suicide rate. e first phase of the research resulted in "remarkable success," with only about a 1 percent difference between the AI's predict- ed rate and the actual suicide rate for a giv- en year, Munmun De Choudhury, PhD, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing who is part of the research team, told Recode. "What our method does is give estimates at a weekly granularity over all of 2019," Dr. De Choudhury explained. "What we are saying is that we can now estimate these rates of suicide up to a year in advance of when death records become available." n SCL Health to apply analytics to improve surgical outcomes, costs By Andrea Park B roomfield, Colo.-based SCL Health has partnered with Empiric Health, a clinical data analytics company launched by Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Health- care, to make data-driven improvements to surgical care quality and costs. Through the partnership, Empiric Health's ar- tificial intelligence-enabled analytics software will identify areas for improvement in surgical planning processes and care delivery. SCL Health clinical teams will have access to this actionable data to inform continuous improvements to quality. "Openly sharing data that our providers and surgeons trust affords us a tremen- dous opportunity to evaluate variability, to continue our commitment to enhancing our quality excellence, including improve- ments in surgical quality and perioperative efficiency, and to ultimately reduce surgical cost," Simon Payne, MD, CMO of clinical and operational transformation at SCL Health, said in a Dec. 23 statement. n SUNY to spearhead genetic research of 1M people for Alzheimer's disease treatments By Jackie Drees S tate University of New York in Albany will establish a research consortium that aims to develop new treatments for Alzhei- mer's disease based on a genetic map of 1 million people with the disease, according to a Feb. 21 news release. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo made a 30-day amendment to the state's fiscal year 2021 executive budget to launch the SUNY Curing Alzheimer's Health Consortium within the State University of New York. SUNY, in collaboration with the Empire State Devel- opment's Life Sciences Initiative, will issue a request for proposals for private providers to partner with the SUNY system and other nonprofit and private hospitals and educational institutions to map the genetics of 1 million Alzheimer's patients over five years. As phase one of the partnership, the Empire State Development Life Science Initiative will provide $20 million to the consortium to identify and recruit 200,000 people for genetic testing. Organiza- tions awarded the request for proposals will partner with SUNY's systems, including SUNY Upstate Medical and SUNY Downstate Medical as well as other medical centers and hospitals. Once the genetics map is completed, the consortium will make the resulting database freely available to support Alzheimer's disease research. n

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