Ari Caroline, Director of Quantitative Analysis and Strategic Initiatives or referred to as QuantStrat at Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and his team are examining ways that data and analytics could be used to make strategic decisions at the medical center. At the opening session titled “The Robot Will See You Now: Tech at the Frontier of Health Care”, Ari Caroline was interviewed by Jonathan Cohn, Senior Editor at the New Republic at the Atlantic Health Care Forum Opening Session held May 1, 2013 in Washington D.C. He explained that the QuantStrat team is examining the power of data and analytics to help MSKCC make more informed and better strategic decisions.
The team uses information available in the hospital’s centralized database. The reason that this information is so valuable is that the database contains longitudinal care for half a million patients and it is possible for treatment patterns to be studied
At this point, the team is using a wide variety of analytical methods to truly understand hospital operations. They are examining the changes in healthcare, science, technology, and ways to help MSKCC stay at the forefront of research and cancer care.
Very importantly, Ari Caroline is leading the efforts at MSKCC to adapt IBM’s Watson technology related to oncology to create a clinical decision system that is evidence-based. The team is giving IBM’s Watson cases with all the information needed to come up with a treatment plan. He predicts that Watson will be very useful in treating cancer as the information now available can be overwhelming and hard for researchers to make sense of the large volume of data.
In the future, vast amounts of genetic data will be collected to enable the medical profession to use the data to help diagnose many illnesses, use the data to devise treatments, and help physicians identify who needs to be treated.
Developing a natural language processing tool will enable the user to plug in the data and then the computer will be able to automatically interpret the information. Today, electronic records use structured information which limits the information that physicians and scientists are able to use. As Ari emphasized, it is important to not only be able to manage information but also to interpret the information so that physicians can better communicate their diagnosis.
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