Though patients (and their outcomes) may be inherently unique, Tashfeen Suleman, CEO and cofounder of CloudMedx, says there still are trends that analytics can help to identify. “If you look at the empirical data, the majority of the patients—their symptoms, outcomes, and diagnoses—always fall within a certain band,” he says, adding that outliers are few and far between, with variances likely to be quite small. “When you look at vitals, you look at certain blood tests and other certain kinds of things, they always point to a range. And using that, if you have X, then you have Y.”
By examining a broad range of data and determining where similarities exist, Suleman believes it’s possible to predict why variances occur in the first place.
