How Predictive Analytics Are Transforming Health Care

Like many hospitals, Advocate was struggling to reduce 30-day hospital readmissions, a key benchmark for Medicare reimbursement. An earlier risk-stratification model developed in-house at Advocate had yielded a model with little predictive power, a result that has been typical for attempts to use administrative data alone to classify patients. The model automated the process, identifying patients deemed at high risk of readmission and embedding the information within the EHR. The first iteration of the model yielded only modest predictive value. But after only a year of use, readmissions from all causes had dropped by 20 percent among the highest-risk patients in the Advocate system when comparing outcomes in the first half of 2013 with the same period in 2014.