Supercrunchers: Evidence-Based Decision-Making

Supercrunchers, by Ian Ayres, is a book that explains “why thinking-by-number is the new way to be smart.” Throughout Supercrunchers, Ayers provides numerous real world examples of how both statistics and intuition can connect, communicate together and in fact help us in the long run by becoming a part of our everyday thinking processes. The enhancement that data-based decision making can afford us will allow businesses to become better decision makers whether it’s through analyzing data for marketing strategies or deciding how to treat a patient. Ayers spends a significant amount of time discussing regression and data mining and how it can be used to anticipate the future. Regressions are used by some familiar matchmaking companies such …show more content…
In fact, physicians are beginning to use evidence-based medicine to guide their decision making in determining the best treatment for patients. Physicians using evidence-based medicine can avoid dangerous misdiagnoses or improper treatment by relying on systematic statistical studies. The growth of the healthcare industry and the transition from paper charting to electronic charting, or e-charting, for physicians and nurses is the beginning of gathering data to generate a prediction. Although there is some pushback from physicians regarding evidence-based medicine, the numbers don’t lie, and “computers are better at remembering things than we are.” Evidence-based medicine encourages physicians to rely not only on their own data and intuition, but to pay close attention to the historical facts and outcomes as …show more content…
In my last position working at Aetna Better Health of Ohio, a new managed care plan released by Aetna, I worked extensively with a program called Predictive Pathways Modeling (PPM). This software was used internally to store data that case managers were to utilize in order to predict how a particular patient would behave, dependent on variables such as cost utilization, chronic illnesses, frequency of emergency room and hospital visits, and other factors that essentially cost a health plan more money. I vividly remember sitting in a meeting with my direct supervisor and explaining how I felt the PPM software we were utilizing was insufficient for the decisions we were making. Besides the fact that the information often entered into the software was incorrect because it was out of date, I was certain that this program alone, by simply just storing data, could not be utilized properly by individuals to predict behavior and as a result determine cost utilization for the health plan. We had no previous data to look at to support the decisions we were making, and the decisions that were being made were subjective and had the potential to severely damage Aetna’s reputation and brand if handled incorrectly. What this system is missing, is data-based decision making