Covid Upside

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Anchor lead: What can a big data analysis of Covid-19 hospitalizations teach us? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Assessment of several clinical factors and other patient characteristics can predict who might have a severe course of Covid-19 when they are hospitalized, a study by Brian Garibaldi, a critical care medicine expert, and colleagues has shown. Garibaldi predicts the data analysis approach used here will reap many benefits beyond Covid-19.

Garibaldi: One of the longitudinal benefits is we’ve gotten together this group of really, really thoughtful biostatisticians, and clinical epidemiologists, who I think are going to be able to apply these methodologies beyond Covid to other diseases. That may be the most exciting piece about this work is not necessarily what happens with Covid but what we might be able to do to inform the interface between big data feeding back into the EHR to actually create real time decision support tools that work.  :29

Such an outcome would bring to fruition long held hopes for artificial intelligence and machine learning, Garibaldi says. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.