Abstract

Health Data Insight has worked with Public Health England and the NHS Business Services Authority to create a database of England’s primary care prescriptions data. This has been linked to the Cancer Analysis System (CAS), a national database of all cancer diagnoses and treatment in England. The aim of the Index of Suspicion project is to use machine learning to identify patterns in medication prescribed prior to the diagnosis of cancer to derive an “index of suspicion” that will predict when a patient is at increased likelihood of developing subsequent cancer.

The exact direction of the internship is dependent on the intern’s interests, but possible areas include: The development and/or refinement of machine learning or statistical methods. The development and implementation of statistical testing of the validity of conclusions. The assessment, dissemination, and/or implementation of conclusions. How significant are the results? What are the best ways to communicate this, and what are the possible impacts on patients? Human interpretability of models.