Healthcare data warehouse provider Health Catalyst has unveiled a free open source, machine learning repository specifically for healthcare data scientists to enable industry-wide collaboration to advance outcomes improvement through artificial intelligence. Named healthcare.ai, the open source repository is designed to make machine learning accessible to the thousands of healthcare professionals who possess little or no data science skills but who share an interest in using the technology to improve patient care.
By making its central repository of proven machine learning algorithms available for free, Health Catalyst’s healthcare.ai enables a large, diverse group of technical healthcare professionals to quickly use machine learning tools to build accurate models. The healthcare.ai site provides one central spot to download algorithms and tools, read documentation, request new features, submit questions, follow the blog, and contribute code.
How healthcare.ai works
The open source repository features packages for two common languages in healthcare data science—R and Python. These packages are designed to streamline healthcare machine learning by simplifying the workflow of creating and deploying models, and delivering functionality specific to healthcare:
– Pays attention to longitudinal questions
– Offers an easy way to do risk-adjusted comparisons
Both healthcare.ai packages provide an easy way to create models on a health system’s own data. This includes linear and random forest models, ways to handle missing data, guidance on feature selection, proper performance metrics, and easy database connections.
– Provides easy connections and deployment to databases
Participation in healthcare.ai is simple. Interested parties can visit the site, choose either the R or Python language, read the install instructions, and follow the examples – at no cost. There is no similar platform or environment for healthcare professionals who are seeking to expand their skills and the value of machine learning to their organization.
“Machine learning and artificial intelligence are going to transform healthcare. We are seeing amazing results and yet we are barely getting started. We are applying it to the reduction of patient harm events, care management, hospital acquired infections, revenue cycle management, patient risk stratification, and more,” said Dale Sanders, Executive Vice President of Health Catalyst in a statement. “With machine learning, the data is talking to us, exposing insights that we’ve never seen before with traditional business intelligence and analytics. By open sourcing healthcare.ai, we hope to facilitate industrywide collaboration and advance the adoption of machine learning, making it easy for healthcare organizations to learn from and enhance these tools together, without the need for a team of data scientists. All of us have seen what open source software has achieved in other industries and we want to be a part of that in healthcare. ”
