OSF HealthCare is turning to researchers for improved insights as it strives to make sure care teams know patients better to prevent health challenges and to manage their chronic diseases.

A recent Connected Communities Initiative (CCI) grant of up to $75,000 will support research to improve health care outcomes by incorporating social drivers of health (SDoH) data into predictive models. Social drivers of health are non-medical factors that have a big impact on a person’s health and wellness. Those can include a person’s financial constraints, housing, transportation, childcare and access to fresh food, among others.

Those needs can often be revealed by where a person lives. For example, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has tied ZIP codes to data showing a person’s life expectancy by neighborhood.

By integrating SDoH factors with information from traditional patient records, the project seeks to develop more accurate predictive models for 30-day hospital readmission and health care costs. Led by a collaborative team of data science experts and health care professionals, the research involves exploring SDoH data features, enriching already existing predictive models, and fine-tuning them for better accuracy.

Chris Franciskovich, vice president for Advanced Analytics, OSF Innovation, stressed, “The goal is to provide actionable insights and develop advanced predictive models to transform health care decision-making and resource allocation. Ultimately, this initiative should benefit patients, health care providers and insurance providers while contributing to advancements in health care technology and practices.”

Illinois State University co-lead researcher professor Maochao Xu, who directs the master’s program in the Mathematics Department, is excited to bring his expertise in statistical modeling to help patients and health systems. Graduate students will also contribute to the work, something Xu thinks is important as the role of artificial intelligence and predictive modeling will have growing applications in health care.

“We have three faculty members working on this who have great experience and can help students develop expertise in dating mining, statistical analysis and building and optimizing predictive models so they’ll help future generations better take care of patients.”

The CCI program is a partnership between OSF HealthCare and Illinois State University. The funding supports research involving clinicians, engineers and social scientists to rapidly develop technologies and devices that could revolutionize medical training and health care delivery.