Applying Contemporary Machine Learning Approaches to Nutrition Care Real-World Evidence: Findings From the National Quality Improvement Data Set.

Using real-world data from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Health Informatics Infrastructure, we use state-of-the-art clustering techniques to identify 2 phenotypes characterizing the episodes of nutrition care observed in the National Quality Improvement (NQI) registry data set. The 2 phenotypes identified from recorded Nutrition Care Process data in the NQI exhibit a strong correspondence with the clinical expertise of registered dietitian nutritionists. For one of these phenotypes, it was possible to implement state-of-the-art classification techniques to predict the nutrition problem-resolution status of an episode of care. Prediction results show that the assessment of nutrition history, number of recorded visits in the episode, and use of nutrition counseling interventions were significantly and positively correlated with problem resolution. Meanwhile, evaluations of nutrition history that were not within the desired ranges were significantly and negatively correlated with problem resolution. Finally, we assess the usefulness of the current NQI data set and data model for supporting the application of contemporary machine learning methods to the data set. We also suggest ways of enhancing the NQI since registered dietitian nutritionists are encouraged to continue to contribute patient cases in this and other registry nutrition studies.

Finding Causal Mechanistic Drug-Drug Interactions from Observational Data.

Many adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are caused by drug-drug interactions (DDIs), meaning they arise from concurrent use of multiple medications. Detecting DDIs using observational data has at least three major challenges: (1) The number of potential DDIs is astronomical; (2) Associations between drugs and ADRs may not be causal due to observed or unobserved confounding; and (3) Frequently co-prescribed drug pairs that each independently cause an ADR do not necessarily causally interact, where causal interaction means that at least some patients would only experience the ADR if they take both drugs. We address (1) through data mining algorithms pre-filtering potential interactions, and (2) and (3) by fitting causal interaction models adjusting for observed confounders and conducting sensitivity analyses for unobserved confounding. We rank candidate DDIs robust to unobserved confounding more likely to be real. Our rigorous approach produces far fewer false positives than past applications that ignored (2) and (3).

Learning Interpretable Behavioral Engagement for Care Management.

The health outcomes of high-need patients can be substantially influenced by the degree of patient engagement in their own care. The role of care managers (CMs) includes enrolling patients and keeping them sufficiently engaged in care programs, so that patients complete assigned goals leading to improvement in their health outcomes. Here, we present a data-driven behavioral engagement scoring (BES) pipeline that can compute the patients' engagement level with regards to their interest in: (1) enrolling into a relevant care program, and (2) completing program goals. This score is leveraged to predict a patient's propensity to respond to CMs' actions. Using real-world care management data, we show that the BES pipeline successfully predicts patient engagement and provides interpretable insights to CMs, using prototypical patient cases as a point of reference, without sacrificing prediction performance.

An Adaptive, Data-Driven Personalized Advisor for Increasing Physical Activity.

In recent years, there has been growing interest in the use of fitness trackers and smartphone applications for promoting physical activity. Many of these applications use accelerometers to estimate the level of activity that users engage in and provide visual reports of a user's step counts. When provided, most recommendations are limited to popular general health advice. In our study, we develop an approach for providing data-driven and personalized recommendations for intraday activity planning. We generate an hour-by-hour activity plan that is based on the user's probability of adhering to the plan. The user's probability of adherence to the plan is personalized, based on his/her past activity patterns and current activity target. Using this approach, we can tailor notifications (e.g., reminders, encouragement) to each user. We can also dynamically update the user's activity plan at mid-day, if his/her actual activity deviates sufficiently from the original plan. In this paper, we describe an implementation of our approach and report our technical findings with respect to identifying typical activity patterns from historical data, predicting whether an activity target will be achieved, and adapting an activity plan based on a user's actual performance throughout the day.

Learning to Personalize from Practice: A Real World Evidence Approach of Care Plan Personalization based on Differential Patient Behavioral Responses in Care Management Records.

Recent studies documented the importance of individuality and heterogeneity in care planning. In practice, varying behavioral responses are revealed in patients' care management (CM) records. However, today's care programs are structured around population-level evidence. What if care managers can take advantage of the revealed behavioral response for personalization? The goal of this study is thus to quantify behavioral response from CM records for informing individual-level intervention decisions. We present a Behavioral Response Inference Framework (BRIeF) for understanding differential behavioral responses that are key to effective care planning. We analyze CM records from a healthcare network over a 14-month period and obtain a set of 2,416 intervention-goal attainment records. Promising results demonstrate that the individual-level care planning strategies that are learned from practice by BRIeF, outperform population-level strategies, yielding significantly more accurate intervention recommendations for goal attainment. To our knowledge, this is the first study of learning practice-based evidence from CM records for care planning, suggesting that increased patient behavioral understanding could potentially benefit augmented intelligence for care management decision support.