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Taking Data Mining to the Next Level


October 3, 2008

Some might call it “data mining on steroids.” But the organizer of an ambitious research project at Montefiore Medical Center in New York describes it as “asking clinically cogent questions of ragged data while respecting the need for user flexibility.”

No matter what you call it, the Clinical Looking Glass project, headed by Eran Bellin, M.D., is taking data mining to the next level. The application, 10 years in the making, is enabling some 250 physicians to conduct their own ad hoc research studies. Some are as simple as identifying all patients taking a drug that has been recalled. Others are far more complex, such as assessing whether a certain type of filter is beneficial to patients with blood clots.

The project began when Bellin and his staff determined that it was difficult, if not impossible, to extract research data from its core clinical information system. The I.T. team searched for an adequate data mining tool to aid with the effort, but couldn’t find one. So they built their own.

Now Emerging Health Information Technology is continuing development in a collaborative project with the U.S. Department of Defense at a yet-to-be-named Washington-area military hospital. Eventually, it hopes to market the data mining software to other hospitals, Bellin acknowledges.

 “To improve the quality of care, you need to be able to find patients, determine if they are doing well, intervene as needed, and then follow up to see how they are doing,” Bellin says. To accomplish those steps requires powerful data mining software, he argues. Equally important, he says, is a culture “that’s open to the possibilities.”

To read an in-depth case study from the October issue of Health Data Management click here.

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