Assessing and Addressing Health Disparities Related to Utilization of Preventive Care Services in Ontario

Health disparities arise as a result of long-standing societal disadvantage and discrimination. As machine learning models become more popular in the healthcare sector, understanding of current health disparities becomes even more critical. Without careful management of existing biases, the models can inherit and amplify health disparities, leading to highly undesirable clinical outcomes. This project focuses on health disparities in access to preventive care services. Preventive care services such as screening and preventive medicine allows for early diagnosis and timely interventions. This project aims to provide an understanding of if and how patterns of preventive care utilization aggravates health disparities in Ontario, by employing advanced data exploration and visualization techniques. After establishing such a relationship, this project also provides an individual risk profiling tool to assess the efficacy of preventive services, using advanced feature representation and deep learning techniques.

Faculty Supervisor:

Marzyeh Ghassemi

Student:

Xuling (Shirly) Wang

Partner:

Layer 6 AI

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

University:

Program:

Accelerate