Utilizing Big Data to Keep Pregnant Women Safe

Informatics is helping to bring diverse data sets together, so healthcare providers can make informed decisions about patients’ health. 

For Casey Overby Taylor, PhD, assistant professor of medicine at John’s Hopkins University, informatics is critical to identifying information about pregnancies and when medications are prescribed that can be found in population data sets. Taylor works to understand methods of leveraging technology to provide decision support for obstetric health providers that are treating pregnant women. 

Taylor’s work shows the importance of using informatics to determine the safest medicine dose for pregnant women by identifying patterns of prescriptions before, during and after pregnancy.

Why informatics? So, clinicians can confidently prescribe medications to pregnant patients.