Which Doctors? and other Adventures with Healthcare Data

The gold standard for modeling infectious disease population 
dynamics is the SIR model. The elegance and simplicity of its 
differential equations is matched only by the stubbornness of humans in 
violating every single one of its assumptions. They insist on spreading 
multiple diseases with overlapping symptoms at the same time, mixing 
according to such nonsensical notions as "friendship" instead of 
behaving like an ideal gas, and building their hospitals where it is 
"convenient" instead of following strict sampling protocols. At Health 
Monitoring Systems, we do our best to answer questions like "How many 
people will get the flu this year?" and "Are an unusual number of people 
sick today?" with tools like control charts and forecasting to help us 
untangle the mess that people have made of what was a rather lovely theory.

Andy Walsh
Chief Science Officer, Health Monitoring Systems
Formerly: Postdoctoral Fellow in Computational Biology at CMU
PhD in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology from the Johns Hopkins 
Bloomberg School of Public Health