ABSTRACT
Total joint replacement (TJR) is one of the most commonly performed, fast-growing elective surgical procedures in the United States. Given its huge volume and cost variation, it has been regarded as one of the top opportunities to reduce health care cost by the industry. Identifying patients with a high chance of undergoing TJR surgery and engaging them for shopping is the key to success for plan sponsors. In this paper, we experimented with different machine learning algorithms and developed a novel deep learning approach to predict TJR surgery based on a large commercial claims dataset. Our results demonstrated that the performance of the gated recurrent neural network is better than other methods regardless of data representation methods (multi-hot encoding or embedding). Additional pooling mechanism can further improve the performance of deep learning models for our case.
ABSTRACT
Data on disease burden are often used for assessing population health, evaluating the effectiveness of interventions, formulating health policies, and planning future resource allocation. We investigated whether Internet usage and social media data, specifically the search volume on Google, page view count on Wikipedia, and disease mentioning frequency on Twitter, correlated with the disease burden, measured by prevalence and treatment cost, for 1633 diseases over an 11-year period. We also applied least absolute shrinkage and selection operator to predict the burden of diseases. We found that Google search volume is relatively strongly correlated with the burdens for 39 of 1633 diseases, including viral hepatitis, diabetes mellitus, multiple sclerosis, and hemorrhoids. Wikipedia and Twitter data strongly correlated with the burdens of 15 and 7 diseases, respectively. However, an accurate analysis must consider each condition's characteristics, including acute/chronic nature, severity, familiarity to the public, and the presence of stigma.
