Using Machine Learning in the Evolving Landscape of Real-World Data

According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the term real-world data (RWD) refers to routinely collected data relating to patient health status and the delivery of healthcare services, and real-world evidence (RWE) is the clinical evidence regarding the usage and potential benefits or risks of a medical product derived from the analysis of RWD. Both RWD and RWE have increasingly attracted attention in the healthcare industry for years now, and rightly so, considering that the healthcare analytics market is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 28.9% between now and 2026. There's no doubt that within this massive data trove, there exist countless insights that could streamline care delivery, help physicians diagnose disease faster, and improve treatment strategies – if only we could identify them. This data revolution we are experiencing in the healthcare industry necessitates the appropriate tools and approaches to work with higher dimensional data sources to truly harvest the insights buried in RWD. Machine learning, an area of artificial intelligence (AI) consisting of a collection of methodologies that focus on algorithmically learning efficient representations of data and extracting insights from data, offers promise and has consistently been gaining traction within the industry in the context of RWD.