Dr. Semmelweis and the Discovery of Handwashing
Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician born in 1818 and active at the Vienna General Hospital. If Dr. Semmelweis looks troubled it’s probably because he’s thinking about childbed fever: A deadly disease affecting women that just have given birth. He is thinking about it because in the early 1840s at the Vienna General Hospital as many as 10% of the women giving birth die from it. He is thinking about it because he knows the cause of childbed fever: It’s the contaminated hands of the doctors delivering the babies. And they won’t listen to him and wash their hands!
In this notebook, we’re going to reanalyze the data that made Semmelweis discover the importance of handwashing. Let’s start by looking at the data that made Semmelweis realize that something was wrong with the procedures at Vienna General Hospital, and later get into his discovery of handwahing and the effect on death rate.
How to Reduce Hospital Readmissions
Hospitals are worried about patients that get readmitted and are looking for strategies to reduce them. The doctors want you to assess if initial diagnoses, number of procedures, or other variables could help them better understand the probability of readmission.
They want to focus follow-up calls and attention on those patients with a higher probability of readmission. For the past ten years of hospital records taken from the dataset, there were 25000 records of patients. These records are being analyzed to provide recommendations that will reduce hospital readmissions. It follows a workflow of first and foremost identifying the factors that affect readmission and providing a probable strategy for prevention and control.
Give Life: Predict Blood Donations
Blood transfusion saves lives – from replacing lost blood during major surgery or a serious injury to treating various illnesses and blood disorders. Ensuring that there’s enough blood in supply whenever needed is a serious challenge for the health professionals. According to WebMD, “about 5 million Americans need a blood transfusion every year”.
Our dataset is from a mobile blood donation vehicle in Taiwan. The Blood Transfusion Service Center drives to different universities and collects blood as part of a blood drive. We want to predict whether or not a donor will give blood the next time the vehicle comes to campus.
