Can Computers Predict Medical Problems? VA Thinks Maybe.

The Veterans Health Administration plans to test how advanced clinical reasoning and prediction systems can use massive amounts of archived patient data to help improve care, efficiency and health outcomes.

The Veterans Affairs Department’s electronic health record system -- the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, or VistA -- stores data on 30 million veterans, including 3.2 billion clinical orders, 1.8 billion medication prescriptions and 2.3 billion vital sign measurements. This structured data is accompanied by 2 billion clinical text notes, with a growth rate of one hundred thousand additional notes per day.

In a request to potential vendors on Monday, VA emphasized that such a system goes far beyond traditional data mining techniques and rules-based clinical decision support systems...