Precision Population Health

Microsoft’s Population Health Group seeks to improve population health and healthcare delivery through an equity lens by using big data, advanced machine learning, and casual inference techniques. The Precision Population Health team is led by Dr. Weinstein, an internationally renowned spine surgeon, policymaker, and healthcare leader.

Team focus areas:

1. Health equity: We provide information and tools that assess whether health care is delivered equitably; support treatment decision tools based in equitable trial design; and recognize that social determinants of health (SDOH) contribute to ~60% of a person’s health. We aim to understand if, when, and for whom diagnostic and treatment interventions would be useful.
2. Quality in care: Often too much or too little care can result in worse health outcomes. We implement methods to adjust for patient demographics, geography, -omics and socioeconomic factors, with: providers, payers, pharma, policy makers, and patients, to assess where quality of care is high and where improvements could be made.
3. Consumer focused decision tools: We create AI-models that are transformed into easy-to-understand visuals that are used for patients and providers to better understand patient preferences and the most appropriate diagnostic and treatment options. Such decision aids are meant to have consumers be fully informed of the risk vs. benefits and be based on the best evidence available at the time.

You can use some of our tools:

• Comparison of Fee-For-Service and Medicare Advantage Rates between 2011 and 2018: These visualizations can be used to compare geographic variation in elective procedure rates, demographics, and correlations with zip-code level social influencers of health.
• Populations with Chronic Conditions and at Higher Risk for Covid-19: These visualizations can be used to explore the percentage of the Medicare population over 65 years of age with 2 or more chronic conditions in each Hospital Service Area (HSA).

Read some of our most recent publications:

• Economic Prosperity and Cardiovascular Mortality Further Evidence That All Policy Is Health Policy
• The Federal Health Authority, a Federal Reserve System for Health Care: COVID-19 Has Exposed a Need for Change
• Medicare Data Reveal Wide Variety Across Regions Of COVID-19 Fatality Risk