B7:    Nursing and informatics in long term care facilities: using knowledge discovery to improve outcomes

Patricia A Abbott PhD RNC. University of Maryland School of Nursing (USA)

Target level: BEGINNERS

The impending crush of the ageing "baby boomers" expected to enter long term care facilities in the next twenty years is heightening awareness of the need to improve the quality and effectiveness of care provided in nursing homes. At present, much of the care afforded in nursing homes is less than optimal. While there are many factors that may contribute to poor care, it is often very difficult to "tease" these factors out of large collections of data accumulating as normal by-products of nursing home care. In order to affect patient outcomes and improve the quality and effectiveness of care, those involved in elder care must be able to harness the data to know what actions and conditions contribute to particular events. Understanding these actions and conditions would allow one to proactively intervene, diminishing or preventing potentially negative outcomes.

This tutorial will focus upon data management issues in long-term care and how advanced techniques such as data mining can be used to filter through large collections of long term care data. The basic principles of data-mining will be discussed, alternative methods for analysis will be covered and the caveats of working with big data highlighted. While the domain of interest is in long-term care, the basic principles of data-mining can be applied in a variety of clinical, administrative, and research areas.