Clinical Data Mining for Physician Decision Making and Investigating Health Outcomes

Patricia Cerrito, PhD, has made considerable strides in the development of data mining techniques to investigate large, complex medical data. In particular, she has developed a method to automate the reduction of the number of levels in a nominal data field to a manageable number that can then be used in other data mining techniques. Another innovation of the PI is to combine text analysis with association rules to examine nominal data. The PI has over 30 years of experience in working with SAS software, and over 10 years of experience in data mining healthcare databases. In just the last two years, she has supervised 7 PhD students who completed dissertation research in investigating health outcomes. Dr. Cerrito has a particular research interest in the use of a patient severity index to define provider quality rankings for reimbursements.