Briefs

August 10, 2005

The University of Alabama at Birmingham Health System and the University of Alabama have partnered with SAS Institute Inc. to evaluate patient database information in an effort to improve patient care.

Business analytics software provider SAS is sponsoring a pilot study to be conducted by students in UA's master's of business administration program. The MBA students will use SAS data and text mining software to examine 12,000 of the 7 million records in UAB Health System's patient database.

Specifically, SAS's Enterprise Miner and Text Miner programs will be used to analyze information from doctors' notes and other textual comments in the database. The unstructured data will be cross-referenced with demographic variables to help track and predict patient response to medical procedures.

Here is the rest of the story.