A1 Readings Pt. 3 DeGruy; Guernsey

DeGruy, Healthcare Applications of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, Journal of Healthcare Information Management, vol 14 no 2, summer 2000

DeGruy makes the case for KDD in healthcare. Am painfully familiar with the questions, slogans, debates, & players.

Successful helathcare KDD implementations:

• HMO determined disease-specific risk for its members: potential for targeted intervention (or potential denial of coverage); means can likewise be used to identify new risk factors in a population
• fraud detection in insurance claims
• NY Worker's Compensation Board decision trees for streamlining compensation claims
• EHRs (electronic health records) are ripe for KDD - who needs flu shots; who isn't following needed treatments, etc.
• medical marketing

NYT article oct 16 2003 "Digging for Nuggets of Wisdom", Lisa Guernsey

Text mining vs. information retrieval: text mining goes beyond tokens, categorization, linking unconnected documents, creating visual representation of related docs, synthesizing new ideas

Text mining vs. data mining: text starts with unstructured data: text

Determine context/resolve ambiguity/select semantic concepts

Text mining might not recognize subtlety