Heart disease is the leading cause of death for people of most racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Cardiovascular disease-related deaths—which occur every 36 seconds—cost our country about $219 billion each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). People with poor cardiovascular health are also at increased risk of severe illness from COVID-19, so the time to act is now. There’s no time like the present to look at major risk factors—from obesity and smoking to high cholesterol and blood pressure—and how to avoid them.
While acute care and medications exist to treat heart disease and other cardiovascular conditions, too often we look at how to manage ailments that already exist, rather than how to prevent them in the first place. While heart disease does affect a massive group of the population, like many diseases, it does discriminate, and without looking at the full spectrum of a patient’s life, it’s impossible to get to the root cause. In recent years, natural language processing (NLP) technology has been used to analyze social determinants of health to uncover helpful, or potentially dangerous, information about patients that may help us understand more about the disease.
Source: Hitconsultant
