Data and Predictions in Healthcare, lessons from the COVID pandemic

May 28

In this podcast

In light of the pandemic, Dr. Gary Puckrein of the National Minority Quality Forum brings up important lessons about how projections from data on COVID-19 correctly anticipated hospitalization rates.

This ability to anticipate is also relevant for other disease areas, and informs therapy to maximize positive individual outcomes.

Read Transcript

DHH
You’re listening to a newsy nugget brought to you by Diverse Health Hub, a health equity education and awareness channel. I’m Christian Strohm, and thanks for tuning in!

We had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Gary Puckrein, president and CEO of the National Minority Quality Forum. Dr. Puckrein highlights the power of data in predicting health outcomes, and discusses the opportunity for intervention in context of the COVID pandemic.

Dr. Puckrein, can you speak on any valuable lessons that we all should learn from this COVID pandemic?

Dr. Puckrein
So, there’s a couple, you know – obviously we’re very early into the epidemic and so it’s hard to draw a lot of lessons and as we get through this, we’ll have time for that. But a couple of quick observations that I would like to make, one is that where healthcare is going these days, it’s about predictions, right? Here, we can predict in January what this virus is going to be doing in populations in April and May.

You could do the same thing with diabetes, with heart failure, renal disease, all of those chronic diseases. When you look at hospitalization rates, mortality costs, those are all highly predictable and the ability to predict means you have the opportunity to intervene and that’s what big data is about. It’s about using that data to get the best possible outcome for patients and so, one of the lessons we hope – as we move away from this virus and get control over it, is that we learn a big-time lesson which is we have a lot of ability to control.

And so, what we talk about less these days is about health disparities and more about controlling health outcomes. We have the capacity to control health outcomes which is a big deal. You couldn’t say that in the 20th century or the 19th century, so the partnerships that we form is really about how do we support local care networks to get predictable positive outcomes for patients.

DHH
Thank you for listening. I’m Christian Strohm and we hope you enjoyed this newsy nugget. Find more on our website, Diverse Health Hub dot Com.

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