New AI method analyzes EHR data to develop personalized Type 2 diabetes care

University of Utah Health, Regenstrief Institute and Hitachi this past week announced the development of a new artificial intelligence approach that could help improve treatment for patients with Type 2 diabetes mellitus. University of Utah researchers had worked with Hitachi for several years to develop a pharmacotherapy selection system for diabetes treatment, but a lack of sufficient data meant that it wasn't always able to accurately predict more complex and less prevalent treatment patterns. So U of U researchers collaborated with Regenstrief experts to enrich the data it was working with – enabling a AI-based approach that first groups patients with similar disease states, then analyzes treatment patterns and clinical outcomes. It's hoped that this new AI-enabled clinical approach can help patients who require complex treatment in checking the efficacy of various drug combinations. "Based on our findings, future progress in techniques for developing models using data from multiple sources, especially when sample sizes of individual sources are small, has the potential to contribute to improved clinical decision support," said researchers in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics.