The goal of healthcare is to provide the most effective treatment to every patient in the most efficient way. Data plays a key role in every aspect of this process — from decision support systems that provide a clinician with the right information at the right time, to scheduling algorithms that predict patient flow and schedule accordingly, to analytics to coach and support patients in achieving or maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Achieving the vision of a data-informed healthcare system will require fundamental advances in many areas including causal inference, inference on complex, high-dimensional and heterogeneous data, missing data, process modeling, bias reduction, statistical validation, and model adaptation, to name a few. In this talk, I will illustrate some of these challenges through concrete examples within the Malone Center.

Gregory D. Hager, Johns Hopkins Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare