MAX Healthcare, Australia’s Deakin University to collaborate on health data mining

Melbourne's (Australia) Deakin University has signed a partnership with indian hospital chain Max Healthcare for a project on data analytics for healthcare management in India.

On Monday they signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to collaborate on the project, which aims at developing predictive model to enhance healthcare management.

Both partners will pool in 'big data' of patient histories, which include data on admissions, diagnosis and outcomes, a huge inventory of images, computerised records and registries and the consequent untapped potential to identify critical safety issues, as well as service and clinical efficiencies to work on the right treatment.

Max Healthcare and Deakin University will leverage state-of-art and verified techniques in data analytics to support clinical decisions.

The immediate project will focus on heart disease, specifically on patients with index admission (symptoms) of Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI) or stroke.

''The primary objective of the report will be to search through the existing data sets for hidden patterns of both the predictable and preventable events in managing the healthcare of individuals.

This will be done by building sophisticated predictive models, utilising machine learning techniques derived from anonymised hospital patient records from diverse hospital data sources,'' Swetha Venkatesh, director, Pattern Recognition and Data Analytics, Deakin University, said.

A joint team will analyse the data, extract relevant features and build a validated machine learning model for specific prediction.

The resultant model will be jointly held and shared by the teams at Deakin and Max healthcare as a prototype programme. Once successful, Max Healthcare would subsequently pilot the model on prospective cases over a period of one year and the predictive accuracy would be calculated and shared with Deakin team.

 ''This association will be a landmark project and take healthcare management to a different level. We look forward to working with Deakin in order to advance research on data analytics for health data,'' Dr Sandeep Budhiraja, clinical director and director of Institute of Internal Medicine, said.