"Measuring Returns to Healthcare Spending"
Joseph Doyle, Erwin H. Schell Professor of Management; Professor of Applied Economics,
MIT Sloan

Abstract: This talk focuses on measuring the returns on healthcare spending.  The goal is to identify value and waste to help create a higher-quality, more cost-effective healthcare system.

This session will focus on using analytics to demonstrate value in a credible way including:  Randomized trials designed to understand provider and patient behavior, A/B testing for incremental improvements, smart piloting of new healthcare delivery methods, and understanding correlation vs. causation in a big data world.

Sites/Projects: MIT Sloan Initiative for Health Systems Innovation,  Health Sector of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab

"Health Systems Innovation via Analytics and Operations Research"
Retsef Levi, J. Spencer Standish (1945) Professor of Management; Professor of Operations Management; Co-Director of Leaders for Global Operations Program, MIT Sloan

In this talk I will discuss several examples of how analytics and operations research approaches could enable system level changes in large academic medical centers. Modeling, analytical and implementation challenges and considerations will be discussed. The examples cover both inpatient and outpatient settings. I will also highlight both technical and organizational key success drivers in collaboration between operations research academics and experts and large health systems. This is joint work with several students at MIT and physician and staff leaders at MGH.

Sites/Projects: Leaders for Global Operations, MIT Sloan Initiative for Health Systems Innovation

"Transforming Healthcare through Innovation in Technology"
David Jaimovich, Chief Medical Officer, Everis Americas

As the demand for nontraditional care evolves, the demand for technologic services such as telemedicine, remote patient, monitoring, innovation, predictive analytics and artificial intelligence is estimated to grow exponentially.

Analytics can enable healthcare organizations to combine data from disparate systems and turn it into the intelligence needed to identify trends and spot gaps in care coordination and delivery. The quest for transformation through the utilization of innovative technology, however, will include some challenges.  The health care industry will need to find a way to:

• Successfully monetize these solutions, ensuring that the results have a positive financial return
• Address consumers’ information and security concerns
• Recognize and respond that as mobile applications mature, they could face the scrutiny of government agencies                                                                                                               

By overcoming these challenges, implementing innovative technologies and leveraging the information acquired, organizations will experience greater efficiency, higher quality care and, ultimately, improved patient outcomes. Healthcare organizations can transform the realities of the industry and start to achieve better patient-specific and population health outcomes in a lower-cost environment while also improving the overall patient experience.

"How Can Emotion Technology and Wearables Improve Future Healthcare?"
Rosalind Picard, Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT Media Lab; Co-Director, Advancing Wellbeing Initiative; Faculty Chair, MIT Mind+Hand+Heart

Abstract: Advances in affective computing have increasingly given technology new skills, demonstrating the ability to sense, recognize, and respond intelligently to many aspects of human emotion. For example, technology can now recognize facial expressions, and see if facial expressiveness is reduced as in depression, or if physiology is showing increased anxiety and stress in the workplace or at home, which may impact several health conditions. This talk will highlight some of the most surprising findings related to these advances, and how they could potentially improve future healthcare. These include new ways in which smartphones can compute your vital signs, even when they are in your pocket, and how electrical signals measured on the wrist can reveal insights into deep brain activity. I will describe applications to autism, anxiety, sleep, memory, epilepsy, mental health, and more. What is the grand challenge we aim to solve next?

Sites/Projects: Affective Computing, Empatica

"Personalized Medicine: A Vision for Research and Education"  
Dimitris Bertsimas, Boeing Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management; Professor of Operations Research, MIT Sloan; Co-Director, Operations Research Center at MIT

Medicine as taught in medical schools and as practiced today is not personalized. This session will present a research program to develop an algorithmic theory of personalized medicine applied to the major human diseases. Using electronic medical records and genomic data and in collaboration with major medical centers and medical doctors, I will discuss our ongoing efforts to develop algorithms that propose personalized treatments for individual patients that suffer from diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease. The new personalized medicine methods are based on cutting-edge Machine Learning algorithms that use modern optimization methods and improve upon classical approaches. I will further discuss the implications of our work on the education of the next generation of doctors.

Sites/Projects: Operations Research Center, MIT Sloan Initiative for Health Systems Innovation