Section: Application Domains

Health

• Care Pathways Analysis for Supporting Pharmaco-Epidemiological Studies. Pharmaco-epidemiology applies the methodologies developed in general epidemiology to answer to questions about the uses and effects of health products, drugs [31], [30] or medical devices [23], on population. In classical pharmaco-epidemiology studies, people who share common characteristics are recruited to build a dedicated prospective cohort. Then, meaningful data (drug exposures, diseases, etc.) are collected from the cohort within a defined period of time. Finally, a statistical analysis highlights the links (or the lack of links) between drug exposures and outcomes (e.g., adverse effects). The main drawback of prospective cohort studies is the time required to collect the data and to integrate them. Indeed, in some cases of health product safety, health authorities have to answer quickly to pharmaco-epidemiology questions.

  New approaches of pharmaco-epidemiology consist in using large EHR (Electronic Health Records) databases to investigate the effects and uses (or misuses) of drugs in real conditions. The objective is to benefit from nationwide available data to answer accurately and in a short time pharmaco-epidemiological queries for national public health institutions. Despite the potential availability of the data, their size and complexity make their analysis long and tremendous. The challenge we tackle is the conception of a generic digital toolbox to support the efficient design of a broad range of pharmaco-epidemiology studies from EHR databases. We propose to use pattern mining algorithms and reasoning techniques to analyse the typical care pathways of specific groups of patients.

  To answer the broad range of pharmaco-epidemiological queries from national public health institutions, the PEPS (PEPS: Pharmaco-Epidémiologie et Produits de Santé – Pharmacoepidemiology of health products) platform exploits, in secondary use, the French health cross-schemes insurance system, called SNDS. The SNDS covers most of the French population with a sliding period of 3 past years. The main characteristics of this data warehouse are described in [29]. Contrary to local hospital EHR or even to other national initiatives, the SNDS data warehouse covers a huge population. It makes possible studies on unfrequent drugs or diseases in real conditions of use. To tackle the volume and the diversity of the SNDS data warehouse, a research program has been established to design an innovative toolbox. This research program is focused first on the modeling of care pathways from the SNDS database and, second, on the design of tools supporting the extraction of insights about massive and complex care pathways by clinicians. In such a database a care pathway is an individual sequence of drugs exposures, medical procedures and hospitalizations.

• Care Sequences for the Exploration of Medico-administrative Data. The difficulty of analyzing medico-administrative data is the semantic gap between the raw data (for example, database record about the delivery at date t of drug with ATC 2 code N 02BE01) and the nature of the events sought by clinicians (“was the patient exposed to a daily dose of paracetamol higher than 3g?”). The solution that is used by epidemiologists consists in enriching the data with new types of events that, on the one side, could be generated from raw data and on the other side, have a medical interpretation. Such new abstract events are defined by clinician using proxies. For example, drugs deliveries can be translated in periods of drug exposure (drug exposure is a time-dependent variable for non-random reasons) or identify patient stages of illness, etc. A proxy can be seen as an abstract description of a care sequence.

  Currently, the clinicians are limited in the expression of these proxies both by the coarse expressivity of their tools and by the need to process efficiently large amount of data. From a semantic point of view, care sequences must fully integrate the temporal and taxonomic dimensions of the data to provide significant expression power. From a computational point of view, the methods employed must make it possible to efficiently handle large amounts of data (several millions care pathways). The aim of the PhD of Johanne Bakalara is to study temporal models of sequences in order 1) to show their abilities to specify complex proxies representing care sequences needed in pharmaco-epidemiological studies and 2) to build an efficient querying tool able to exploit large amount of care pathways.