Principal Investigator David Sontag
More than 115 people in the United States die each day after overdosing on opioids. The type of opioid, how much was prescribed, and for how long, are all factors in who succumbs to addiction. That has led to a focus among public health officials to develop tools that can improve how pain-killers are prescribed. MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab researchers are applying machine learning tools to medical insurance-claim records to understand what kinds of medical histories and prescription practices raise red flags. Their goal is to develop a model that can help doctors tailor prescriptions to individual patients to minimize addiction risk.