Brian Patterson, MD, MPH, will serve as co-principal investigator on a research project that has been awarded funding from the American Family Insurance Data Science Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Institute announced nine campus research projects selected for funding through the fourth round of the American Family Funding Initiative.
The Funding Initiative is a partnership between Data Science Institute and American Family Insurance that provides UW-Madison faculty and staff with support for data science and artificial intelligence research that is relevant to the insurance industry. Launched in 2020, this initiative has provided 27 researchers and teams with nearly $4 million for their work, and it is expected to position UW-Madison faculty to launch and further their cutting-edge data science research.
Funds are awarded through a competitive application process administered by Data Science Institute, and American Family Insurance provides selected projects with funding and mentoring by their data scientists. Both organizations evaluate applications on their novelty, potential impact to data science and alignment with topics of interest to American Family.
Amy Cochran, PhD (Mathematics and Population Health Sciences) is the principal investigator on the project funded by the grant, titled “Quasi-Experimental Designs for Learning Systems.” Brian Patterson, MD, MPH, and Gabriel Zayas-Caban, PhD (Industrial and Systems Engineering) will serve as co-principal investigators. A growing number of systems, including hospitals and insurance companies, aim to derive knowledge from internal data to improve their day-to-day operations. This project will develop a causal inference framework for estimating the effects of interventions on these systems and provide algorithms to guide their use of risk prediction models in their operations, with the ultimate goal of improving services and reducing costs.
Dr. Patterson is an assistant professor of emergency medicine, with affiliate faculty appointments with the UW-Madison Departments of Biostatistics & Medical Informatics and Industrial & Systems Engineering. His research focuses on clinical informatics and geriatric emergency medicine. His work aims to use routinely collected clinical data to generate actionable insights to improve the quality and safety of emergency care for older adults.