NIH grant to study unstructured data that can improve patient safety

Reports that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US have led the Institute of Medicine and several state legislatures to suggest that data from patient safety event reporting systems could help health care providers better understand safety hazards and, ultimately, improve patient care.

"Tens of thousands of these safety report databases provide a free text field that does not constrain the reporter to fixed, predefined categories," said Srijan Sengupta, Assistant Professor of Statistics in the College of Science and a faculty member at the Discovery Analytics Center.

Sengupta has received an $815,218 Research Project Grant (R01) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop novel statistical methods to analyze such unstructured data in safety reports.

"Detailed information that spans multiple categories can be more valuable than identifying an event by just checking off a category," he said.

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Source: EurekAlert, 13 November 2019