Who we are and what we do

The mission of West Health Institute is to lower healthcare costs to enable seniors to successfully age in place, with access to high-quality, affordable health and support services that preserve and protect their dignity, quality of life and independence. Data Science is fundamental to this mission because data informs the institutional policy decisions for both private and public organizations.

The West Health Institute has developed substantial in-house, multi-disciplinary expertise in data-driven methods for decision-making through its Data Science Engineering team. Bringing together access to major healthcare-related databases with core skills and resources, capabilities include everything from database administration to economic analysis to statistics to data visualization for quantitative insights tailored to research goals. The Data Science team extracts, transforms, merges, and loads data sources to create descriptive and predictive models of care for all aspects of aging-related research through customized HIPAA-compliant private cloud on running Amazon Web Services (AWS).

What to expect on this blog

Articles in this blog will be of three types.

• Sharing of our novel Data Science methods.

For example, we are currently developing techniques for quasiorthonormal encoding for outlier and cluster analysis on anonymized data along with customized activation functions for Tensorflow/Pytorch. Stay tuned!

• General discussion of aspects of machine learning principles as applied to medical data. For example, what are the principles and pitfalls of doing machine learning on private data.

• Implementation methods for deploying high-quality, reliable, Data Science products. For example, how do you scale and deploy Data Science products derived from private data sources.