Another reason to digitize medical records
To enable computer analysis, since computers can detect abuse better than doctors. From New Scientist:
Victims of domestic abuse can hide the truth from doctors, but they leave clues in their medical records that a computer program has now learned to follow.
Ben Reis of Harvard Medical School and his colleagues worked with six years’ worth of medical histories for 561,000 people, 19,000 of whom were known to have been abused. Their program searched two-thirds of these records for differences between the histories of abused people and the rest, and then produced rules for distinguishing the groups.
The rules mainly looked at patterns of injuries and bouts of mental illness – signs of abuse that doctors often look for. But the program also found new clues, such as alcohol problems, that pick out women victims but not men.
When fed the unused medical histories, the program detected abuse earlier on in people’s records than their doctors had (BMJ, DOI: 10.1136/bmj.b3677).
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