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The Facts Don’t Speak For Themselves:

AHRQ 2007 HS KaplanR LevitanB Rabin FastmanCUMC/NYPH

Getting the Story from Aggregate Data

AHRQ 2007

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Event Reports as Rumble Strips

• Both can help increase safety by revealing danger

• Neither is reliably quantitative

• Both may create some unwanted noise in the environment

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Counting: A Means to an End

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Steinbeck on Counting

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Focus of Today’s Presentation Discuss real-time database queries using built-in

tools:

• RAI: Risk Assessment Index

• “Single Click” Standard reports

• QBF: Query by Field

• Data Mining: Clustering, CBR, and HAWK –

Constraint - Access: Permissions and roles

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Access: Permissions and Roles• User-based

– Role within organization– Role within MERS system

• Overarching access rule set – Location– Service line/Department– Employee events/Patient complaints– Type: falls, meds, transfusion, equip, etc.– Read-only

• HIPAA

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Filter no-harm reports to improve signal-to-Filter no-harm reports to improve signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)noise ratio (SNR)

Risk Assessment Index

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Two Filters to Enhance SNR

ImpactImpact

Freq

uency

Freq

uency LowLow

HighHigh

MediumMedium

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“Single Click” Standard Reports

• Ad-hoc reporting in real-time

• MERS has a comprehensive list of reports

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“Single Click” Standard Reports

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Medication Events by Specific Type

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Query By Field (QBF): Exact field matches

QBF’s filtered results can be fed into any report, graph, or spreadsheet

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Generation of Graphicson data subset using QBF filter

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Medication Drill-Down: Categories of Ordering Errors

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Benchmark Against Total and Other Reporting Sites/Hospitals

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Real-Time, Formatted SpreadsheetsExample: Fall outcomes report, breakdown by unit, opened in Excel

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User-Customized Spreadsheets

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Mining Association Rules

Decision Trees

IDClustering

Statistical Clustering

Data Mining

CBR

Similarity Matching

Textual

Numeric

Semantic

Neural Networks

© 2007 by The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York.

CBR

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Why Cluster?• Clusters show us event reports that are similar

across predefined dimensions

• They may represent:– frequency of a type of event– event trends in time – potential prevention, etc

© 2007 by The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York.

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Case-Based Reasoning (CBR)

What is case-based reasoning?• Case-based reasoning is another methodology

for, among other things, identifying clusters of similar events in large databases

© 2007 by The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York.

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Clustering/CBR

Clustering divides large data sets into coherent subsets that can be studied more easily

• Given an event report, CBR will – go through all event reports in database

– compute similarity between them

– find all reports within a certain distance or similarity (defined by the user)

• These reports form a cluster

© 2007 by The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York.

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CBR and Similarity Matching• Using CBR, the computer system can establish

the closest matches to any target event

• It can cluster based on similarity

• It can also identify unique events

© 2007 by The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York.

CBR and Similarity Matching

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HAWK• MERS’ similarity function, HAWK,

uses a vector of pre-assigned weights that corresponds to the vector of variables in an event report record.

• HAWK provides information that can be used to evaluate trends

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CBR: Another Use

• CBR can be extended to provide solutions to problems based on past experiences in the database– e.g., a help desk

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The Facts Don’t Speak For Themselves:

“Knowledge resides in the user and not in the collection.”

C. West Churchman in The Design of Inquiring Systems