Carnegie Mellon Students and Faculty Use AI to Help Transplant Centers Improve Patient Education Resources
- iSchools News
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
When a patient has an organ transplant, clear, accessible information can make all the difference. That’s why Transplants.org turned to Heinz College Trustees Professor of Management Science and Healthcare Informatics Rema Padman, a health care analytics and informatics expert, and a team of Heinz College graduate students to analyze patient education materials from transplant centers across the U.S.
With the mission of improving outcomes and access for transplant patients, Mace and Padman evaluated a variety of topics that were important to patients. Transplants.org identified the transplant patient handbook as one critical aspect of care that could potentially be improved to meet the evolving needs of patients.
Mace partnered with Padman and the Heinz College student team on a semester-long capstone project to produce an in-depth comparative analysis of patient materials across U.S. organ transplant centers.
The interdisciplinary student team analyzed 100 handbooks from 23 transplant centers, large and small, across the U.S.
The result, powered by natural language processing and generative artificial intelligence methods to produce models with data-driven evidence, demonstrates the current state of organ transplant patient educational materials in the U.S., highlighting the challenges in maintaining consistency, completeness, and currency of the content. By building awareness of the discrepancies in the content for a complex patient population, this effort is anticipated to inform and influence transplant centers in the development of future patient education handbooks that best serve transplant recipients everywhere.
Padman, who advised the student team throughout the project, emphasized the significance of this kind of applied learning.
“This was an opportunity for students to engage deeply with a real-world health care challenge using cutting-edge AI and analytics methods,” Padman said. “Their work not only supports better outcomes for patients and health systems, but also showcases how technology, analytics, and policy can be aligned in the service of public good of great societal value.”
This text is a short version of the original news post by Jennifer Monahan (Carnegie Mellon University)