Open Source Site Aims to Boost Use of Machine Learning

A vendor with experience and products in data warehousing and analytics is creating a community for open-source software intended to streamline efforts to use Machine Learning applications in healthcare.

Health Catalyst has created healthcare.ai as a repository of healthcare-focused Open Source Machine Learning software, saying that it’s important for the industry to benefit from the technology and democratize machine learning in healthcare. In addition to creating the web site and contributing its tools and algorithms to the open-source community, the company is offering ongoing support to maintain it.

The Salt Lake City-based company says the site will provide one site to download algorithms and tools, contribute code, read documentation and communicate with other healthcare professionals who are interested in using the technology to improve patient care.

The initiative hopes to spread interest and use of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence by serving as a repository for coding work in the healthcare arena.

Health Catalyst says healthcare.ai facilitates the development of predictive and pattern recognition models using a healthcare organization’s own data, and it features packages for two common languages in healthcare data science—Python and R.

The packages are intended to streamline healthcare machine learning by simplifying the workflow of creating and deploying models and delivering functionality specific to healthcare. Specifically, they pay attention to longitudinal questions, offer an easy way to do risk-adjusted comparisons, and provide easy connections and deployment to databases.

Both healthcare.ai packages provide an easy way to create models on healthcare organizations’ data. This includes linear and random forest models, ways to handle missing data, guidance on feature selection, proper performance metrics and easy database connections.