Growing up, I always had an affinity for numbers because of my love for the game of baseball. When I was younger I could rattle off batting averages, HR, RBI, you name it I knew it. Even career numbers for some of my favorites. This probably explains why I’m now tracking towards a career in a statistical analysis. Even though my interests right now are using my analyst tools to focus on baseball numbers. Who isn’t these days though? I mean the internet is flooded with people writing about a data driven approach to baseball management. Loads more are using the info to compete in fantasy baseball leagues. The majority of these people are doing all of this analysis on an unpaid basis, including myself.

A recent NY Times OP-ED piece by current A’s GM Billy Beane, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and former Presidential candidate John Kerry calls for a data driven approach to reform our health care system. I agree wholeheartedly with their assessment. We need this if we are going to make the necessary moves towards saving our system from either A) collapsing in on itself under the weight of the increased demand of our aging baby boomers or B) we allow the system to continue growing uncontrollably like it is and bankrupt the budget. Anyone see a bubble forming in the health care sector?

Subjecting our medical care to data, called “evidence-based medicine,” is a Radically American Idea. And a needed one at that. I know there are people out there who have the technical knowledge to start working on projects immediately. I know this because I follow the baseball blog scene and there is plenty of analysis going on. I’m one of these guys. Now granted baseball has the advantage of being a sport people love to watch. This makes doing the analysis of the stats feel like leisure rather than true “work.” But I imagine there are some others out there who would like to help out and work on health care issues. As I write this, I’m slightly intrigued by what I could do if I had an interesting question to work on and some data.

This would take some work but I think if three changes were made to the current system we’d have people jumping on questions and finding answers real soon:

1. Publicly available data. Baseball data is freely available in various forms all over the net. Check out my sidebar. Health care data needs to be made available to the masses. It may already be out there, but I’m unaware of it and welcome your help. I mean keep people’s private information anonymous, but publish hospital records and get some people working on analysis of treatments. Publish system wide data and see if people can’t figure out where to save some money.

2. This one is critical. We have to change the focus of the health care system, right now doctors get paid by filling out the proper insurance forms and performing approved treatments on people. The system should be rewarding doctors for focusing on patient outcomes. I mean the point of the system is not to treat the symptoms at the expense of the patient’s quality of life. We need these people to get better and get off their dependency of the system. For complex diseases without available cures we need to maximize the patient’s quality of life. We also need a disincentive program for doctors that over prescribe drugs for healthy people. (I know about malpractice suits, we need something better than that. Something with more immediate feedback or consequences.) It seems like just about every kid these days is a candidate for ADD medication. There are kids who need this no doubt about it, but there are also some kids who are just a little energetic and doctors to take a stand on this matter and just say no. We can help them do this.

More on the focus of health care when I get a chance to type up my review of Arnold Kling’s Econtalk interview about health care.

3. Incentivize the ‘net community. NetFlix style. Someone has to start making other people aware of the key issues and questions that the medical profession needs the answers to and offer rewards for working solutions. I’m sure there is money out there that can be freed up for some quality medical information. The government included. Again if this already exsists, please let me know. Baseball is getting all kinds of people working for free. Even modest rewards would get people to start answering big questions.

No blog post about evidence based medicine is complete without referencing Ian Ayers’ book Supercrunchers. Ayers is a major proponent of EBM and he makes a compelling case for those who are still not convinced.

I present yet another example of the data collecting world we live in.

See this pseudo analysis of online gaming guilds and their “failure cascades” (how guilds / social groups dissipate).

The linkedto analysis isn’t that great but the idea of it is unique to our day and age.  You can actually run massive social and behavioral analysis without huge academic grants nor fancy labs.  Sign up for Second Life, WoW, Halo 3… and you get access to huge amounts of game theory data, EAB schedules and so much more.

In fact, I believe it is THIS EXACT FACET of our modern experience that is the reason things are moving so fast (or appearing to move so fast).  We have so much data showing us how, why, when, what, how much people do that we are forced to course correct and evolve every product, service, brand all the time.

There are several new books/papers on this subject.  SuperCrunchers does a good job outlining this fact of life.  check it out of it interests you…

~Russ