Thanks to rapidly falling disk costs, companies
can now afford to store trillions of bytes of
valuable information. However, data
professionals know that storing the data is just
the foundation and the real challenge is making
sense from these huge data stores and mining
them for statistically significant events. This
is an area where Oracle excels, and Oracle
customers can now store unprecedented amounts of
information and use Oracle tools to mine gold
from these vast arrays of data.
Scientists know that valid research requires
scanning through gigabytes of data to locate
significant correlations, often using heuristic
models to find important relationships between
data items. Powerful tools such as Oracle
Discoverer and Oracle Data Mining (ODM) improve
the quality of health care, and these tools are
helping Oracle scientists to save lives.
Inside Oracle medical informatics
Nowhere is this life-saving research as
prevalent as it is in the area of
medical informatics, where highly skilled
doctors are leveraging patient treatment
information to perform advanced analytics such
as predictive modeling, measuring the efficacy
of life-saving drugs and detecting dangers that
have a direct impact on the health and safety of
millions of patients.
Oracle medical informaticists require the
most scientific training of all Oracle
professionals, and it is a database role that
requires knowledge of both medicine and advanced
statistics. Today's clinical databases store
detailed information about patient diagnoses,
lab test results and details from patient
treatments, a virtual gold mine of information
for medical researchers. Utilizing data mining
techniques with medical treatment data is a
virtually unexplored frontier.
According to Mike Ault, a recognized expert
in Oracle data warehousing, Oracle Discoverer
and data mining tools are a godsend to medical
researchers:
Oracle Discoverer and ODM give doctors the
tools that they need to find drug
contraindications and to measure the
efficacy of treatment regimens. I've seen
informaticists develop medical decision
support systems that allow doctors to
drill-down and show details that are
impossible with ordinary query tools. If you
want to see how something works in the
real-world, these are the tools that will
get you there.
While scientific research and clinical trials
are essential in discovering safe and effective
drugs, the recent drug recalls by the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration highlight some of the
unavoidable risks that are associated with
clinical trials. Empirical evidence suggests
that the only way to fully understand a system
of complex drug interactions is to sample and
analyze real-world data.
Whether scientists are researching the
behavior of drugs, studying the demand for
products or learning about the behavior of
software, the application of heuristic
techniques has answered the question of "how
things work." Medical informaticists specialize
in using Oracle Discoverer, Oracle OLAP and
Oracle Data Warehouse Builder, and many are also
experts in multivariate statistics using
statistical programs such as SAS and SPSS. The
new release of Oracle 10g has incorporated
similar statistical functions allowing fast and
powerful analytical capabilities for hypothesis
testing.
Using powerful Oracle tools such as Oracle
Discoverer and Oracle Data Mining, medical
researchers are discovering trends and patterns
that will improve the health care for millions
of people around the globe.
We are also starting to see medical experts
combining their medical qualifications with
Oracle database certification, as with
Dr. Timothy Wu, MD OCP, an Oracle scientist
working for the Walter Reed Medical Center in
Washington, DC.
Dr. Wu says that Oracle tools give medical
doctors a tool to help them quickly make sense
of vast clinical databases. "Understanding the
complex relationships that occur among patient
symptoms, diagnoses and behavior is one of the
most fascinating areas I have studied," says Dr.
Wu. "I use Oracle's advanced analytical features
to drill from the overall summary at the
hospital level to the patient-level detail."
Mining gold from Oracle
Scientists can now search for important facts
within huge clinical databases, a task that
would be virtually impossible without tools such
as
Oracle Discoverer. The concepts behind data
mining have been around for decades, but they
are gaining popularity because cheap disks now
make it economically feasible to have instant
access to vast databases. In the area of
Oracle Business Intelligence, data mining
can save companies millions of dollars each year
by targeting advertising to consumers who are
the most likely to want their products, but
these techniques are also being used to improve
the quality of health care. For example, knowing
that patients with specific demographics have a
predilection for certain kinds of diseases can
lead to preventative measures to control certain
kinds of cancer.
The Oracle Data Mining (ODM) product is one
of the most sophisticated tools for
understanding "how things work" in the real
world. Using advanced data mining techniques,
ODM scans trillions of bytes of data seeking out
statistically significant correlations and
presents heuristics, all based on probabilities.
One of the most powerful aspects of ODM is that
the data stays in the database and allows users
to access the results with reporting tools,
display the results in a portal or conduct
further studies of the data using OLAP.
This approach has been so successful that
many Oracle Data Warehouse customers report a
payback period of less than a year, with direct
immediate savings from the insights revealed by
the Oracle tools. It's also the stuff of legend
and urban myths, such as the beer and diapers
legend that is used by college professors to
explain the huge benefits of data mining
technology:
A number of convenience store clerks, the
story goes, noticed that men often bought beer
at the same time they bought diapers. The store
mined its receipts and proved the clerks'
observations correct. So, the store began
stocking diapers next to the beer coolers, and
sales skyrocketed. The story is a myth, but it
shows how data mining seeks to understand the
relationship between different actions.
As George Santayana said, "Those who forget
the past are condemned to repeat it," and this
is the guiding principle for making forecasts
with Oracle data.
When reviewing trends in historical data, it
is often advantageous to discard outliers, or
data points that lie outside expected
parameters. In health care, the outliers are
often the most interesting cases and bear
further investigation. The Oracle data mining
development team has released a new algorithm in
10g release 2 that can find these "rare cases,"
which could correspond to unusual symptoms that
may foretell the outbreak of disease.
"Health care is the virtually untouched area
where higher analytical tools can be used to
find solutions that will benefit not only
ourselves, but our children and generations that
follow," says Jacek Myczkowski, Oracle's Vice
President of Data Mining Technologies and Life
Sciences, who spoke at DCI's Business
Intelligence and Data Warehousing Conference
recently. Dr. Myczkowski represented Oracle in
the DM Review's World Class Solution Awards,
where Oracle partnered with Walter Reed as one
of three finalists in the Business Intelligence
category. He went on to say that health care is
one of the biggest businesses in the world
today, and that money invested in learning how
to improve patient care will have greater impact
on society as a whole than in marketing, retail
or sales data.
Data mining helps tune Oracle databases
Tools such as Oracle Discoverer and Oracle
Data Mining are now being applied to dozens of
types of applications, even including Oracle's
own metadata. The Oracle 10g Automatic Workload
Repository (AWR) captures information about
Oracle's performance over time, and this wealth
of performance information is revolutionizing
Oracle tuning.
Don Burleson, author of the book "Oracle
tuning: The definitive reference," notes
that Oracle professionals are applying the same
principles of medical informaticists and that
it's almost impossible to reproduce performance
issues in a lab environment:
"A busy Oracle database changes so rapidly
that trend-based analysis is the only
solution for tuning transient Oracle
performance problems. The Oracle AWR keeps
details on how tables are accessed, what
indexes are used and a wealth of other
information that is critical to any
successful running effort."
Oracle Data Mining has also been shown to
help medical informaticists select attributes
for an OLAP cube, as was demonstrated at the
recent Oracle Open World. When the analyst is
faced with selecting from a vast array of
characteristics about health relating to some
measure of outcome, such as patient age, gender,
weight, blood pressure, blood fat level and so
on which impact acquiring diabetes, for example,
ODM tools can be used to find the most important
attributes and narrow the selections. This
feature reduces the dimensionality of the OLAP
cube, making it far easier to understand the
relationships among the various demographic
attributes, and enhances performance of the
query tool.
Conclusion
This short article is just an introduction to
how Oracle software is saving lives, and I'm
both thrilled and honored to have a job where I
can apply my skills to help improve the lives of
others. It would be very difficult without
Oracle tools, and I'm very proud that Oracle has
invested in making these powerful tools that
enable us to help others.
Whereas data mining is being used to reduce
churn, when for example mobile phone users
switch to alternative wireless businesses, or to
increase the return on investment for companies,
applying business intelligence in the life
sciences to improve the quality of health care
has tremendous benefits for all of us.
About the Author
Dr. Carolyn Hamm is a recognized expert in
Oracle data warehouse technologies, advanced
analytics and Oracle data mining. Earning her
Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, Dr. Hamm has
spent the past eight years developing
Web-enabled data systems for population health,
accessed by research, clinical and
administrative staff. Dr. Hamm is the author of
the forthcoming book "Oracle
Data Mining: Mining gold from your warehouse."
Reader comments
If you want a good
article on saving lives with Oracle, look at
what Cerner corp out of Kansas City is doing.
Their software uses the oracle database, and
does the full range of drug interaction
checking, as well as medical condition checking,
and even ordering tests.
It even has a
rules system that watches for interrelated
results and automatically recommends further
tests to order based on the results of earlier
tests. It does a lot more then Oracle's product
ever
dreamed of.
--
Oracle ACE
'If at first you don't succeed, don't take up
skydiving.'