“In health care,
there’s this gigantic world of unstructured data that needs to be translated
into
useable
information,” says Paul Nemirovsky, who co-founded dMetrics with Ariadna
Quattoni.
Image: MIT News
Software analyzes online chatter to predict health care
consumers’ behavior.
(December 22, 2015) Millions
of people each month report positive and negative health care feedback across
the Web. Some jump into forums to complain about ineffective prescriptions or
to discuss which drugs are best to treat illnesses. Others take to blogs to
describe symptoms and how to get relief.
MIT spinout dMetrics believes this online chatter is an
information treasure-trove for the health care industry. “In health care,
there’s this gigantic world of unstructured data that needs to be translated
into useable information,” says Paul Nemirovsky PhD ’06, who co-founded
dMetrics with Ariadna Quattoni PhD ’09.
The startup has developed a platform called DecisionEngine
that uses machine learning and natural language processing — which helps
computers better understand human speech — to mine billions of conversations
about drugs, medical devices, and other health care products. These discussions
are happening on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, forums, and even in comments
accompanying news articles and videos.
From those vast stores of messy data, the software reveals
insights into consumer decisions, Nemirovsky says: “What people do, don’t do,
consider doing, may do, did in the past, as well as what needs, fears, and
hopes they have.”
Today, Nemirovsky explains, dMetrics has a database that
includes every public comment about patient-reported illnesses, solutions, and
outcomes, pulled from more than 1 million online sources. This includes
information on more than 14,000 health care products.
Clients, including Fortune 500 companies and nonprofit
organizations, can use dMetrics software to answer specific questions, such as
how many patients used a specific medication for a particular reason in certain
time frame, or which customers are considering switching from their drug to a
competitor’s drug.
Although focusing on the health care industry, dMetrics,
headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, is also trialing its platform with
consumer finance and political organizations. Credit card companies, for
instance, can analyze why consumers favor specific credit cards over others.
Political scientists could use the software to determine which issues people
care about and how strongly they stand behind their opinions.