Making an Impact on Healthcare

Professor Arthur Yeh and Assistant Professor Amanda Cook are both making an impact on our healthcare system through the application of their work. Dr. Yeh's most recent work addresses how to apply statistical analysis techniques to improve the monitoring of complex, correlated variables that can support improved patient care. The work he and his team are progressing has the potential to help doctors and nurses with earlier detection when a critical variable becomes out of control. Their ability to help doctors leverage the many streams of sensor data and integrate it with clinical observation data has the potential to enhance diagnostic abilities and improve the overall quality of patient care.

Dr. Cook is applying her expertise in the area of the health insurance industry. She will be presenting her work on health insurers at the upcoming American Risk and Insurance Association session at the American Economic Association annual meeting. The work focuses on exploring administrative services-only business and its role in the U.S. private health insurance market. Presenting at this conference will provide her an opportunity to share her findings with both academics and practitioners.

This summer, Dr. Yeh and a team of researchers also completed an analysis of the opioid epidemic, in particular, heroin-related overdoses around the Cincinnati area. The study identified that the opioid epidemic disproportionately affected Cincinnati and helped to identify specific areas that required more policy attention and targeted interventions to improve public health and alleviate high heroin-related overdose rates. The team provided specific guidance for policymakers to help them evaluate and strategically improve the utilization of public health services related to the opioid epidemic.

Fig. 1 Distribution of heroin-related overdose incident rates by census block groups in Cincinnati, Ohio, from January 2015 to December 2020.¹

¹Choi, Jung Im, Jinha Lee, Arthur B. Yeh, Qizhen Lan, and Hyojung Kang. "Spatial clustering of heroin-related overdose incidents: a case study in Cincinnati, Ohio." BMC public health22, no. 1 (2022): 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-13557-3