The opioid epidemic is a national crisis affecting individuals’ health, social, and economic welfare, as well as that of families, communities, and the country as a whole. Many addicts were first exposed to the drug for pain management.

What if we could leverage predictive analytics to help guide patients and the healthcare system before, during, and after an opioid prescription? Could it help reverse the crisis? We believe it can.

The Benefits of Predictive Analytics

First, what is predictive analytics?

“Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of statistical techniques from data mining, predictive modeling, and AI machine learning, that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future or otherwise unknown events.” –Source: Wikipedia

Predictive analytics has the potential to be a game-changing addition in the fight against opioid addiction. It can inform the medical community, the policy community, and patients themselves about where dangers lie, and how to avoid and overcome them.

A few of the things predictive analytics can do to help the opioid crisis:

  • Discover key risk indicators; early signals that certain prescriptions, combinations of prescriptions, or frequency of prescriptions are less likely to have negative effects.
  • Analyze patient behavior to proactively inform their support community of abnormal or undesired activities.
  • Identify trends or issues in medication supply chains, diagnosis and prescribed treatments, medication fulfilments, adverse events, and related criminal activities.
  • Mine big data for insights that can improve healthcare protocols, recognize community-level risks, and enable data-driven policy.

Graham’s Opioid Dashboard Insights Solution

At Graham, we set out to build a predictive analytical capability as a platform for building data-driven insights throughout the opioid community – from patients to physicians, healthcare institutions to medical facilities, agencies, regulators, and policymakers. It’s called Opioid Dashboard Insights (OD Insights).
Our goal is to provide:

  • State-of-the-art, real-time health care to help patients avoid or recover from opioid addiction.
  • Data-driven trends to support the holistic management and eradication of the opioid epidemic.

Built to support the HHS Opioid Management 5-Point Strategy to Combat the Opioid Crisis, OD Insights integrates anonymized big data sets from hospitals, clinics, parole officers, social workers, and other sources to provide holistic management capabilities. This data, along with anecdotal evidence from patients using an OD Insights mobile application, is analyzed to identify trends that might assist in identifying risk factors and addiction preventative techniques.

While there are many applications for big data analysis of health care information, we utilize strategies from SAMHSA’s Guiding Principles and Elements of Recovery-Oriented Systems of Care to help support all aspects of recovery and prevention. OD Insights includes the patient in their own health awareness and care. That means that the data we collect is not only intended to help government and healthcare institutions but also to enable the patient to build awareness of his or her status and become an active and informed participant in their health care management.

OD Insights offers the tools, techniques, and technologies to lead patients through a tumultuous and vulnerable time, preventing addiction or assisting in recovery. It helps the healthcare community strengthen its understanding of this epidemic for unparalleled management.

Download the OD Insights whitepaper to learn more, or reach out for a conversation.