Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance, Amazon Partner on Machine Learning Research Sponsorship -

Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance (PHDA) announced today that it is working closely with Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com A unique consortium formed four years ago by UPMC, the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the PHDA uses the "big data" generated in health care -- including patient information in the electronic health record, diagnostic imaging, prescriptions, genomic profiles and insurance records -- to transform the way that diseases are treated and prevented, and to better engage patients in their own care. New machine learning technologies and advances in computing power, like those offered by Amazon SageMaker and Amazon EC2, are making it possible to rapidly translate insights discovered in the lab into treatments and services that could dramatically improve human health. Through the AWS Machine Learning Research sponsorship, PHDA scientists from both Pitt and CMU expect to accelerate research and product commercialization efforts across eight projects, including those with the potential to create an individual risk score for every cancer patient, thus enabling doctors to better predict the course of a person's disease and response to treatment; use a patient's verbal and visual cues to diagnose and treat mental health symptoms; and reduce medical diagnostic errors by mining all the data in a patient's medical record. Data are secure, anonymized and stay with PHDA institutions.