AllianceChicago, a nonprofit supporting more than 80 community health centers, maintains patient records fragmented across electronic health records, registries, and claims systems with no shared identifier, producing duplicates that drive redundant testing and unsafe clinical decisions. This project designed an explainable, auditable electronic Master Patient Index combining data cleaning, multi-pass blocking, deterministic rules, and gradient-boosted models, evaluated against a gold standard built through targeted human review, assuming structured, batch-processed demographic data. Because a missed duplicate perpetuates fragmentation while a false merge conflates two patients, the pipeline prioritizes recall, reaching 83.5% precision and virtually 100% recall on approximately 164,000 records.
Watch the team present this project at 01:52:12 in the session recording here.
Keywords: Entity Resolution, Electronic Medical Records (EMR), Patient Matching, Record Linkage, Master Patient Index, Gradient-Boosted Trees, Machine Learning, Data De-duplication, Explainable AI
Faculty Advisor
Dr. Arnab Bose is a Senior Instructional Professor and Faculty Director of the MS in Applied AI program at the University of Chicago Data Science Institute. He is also the Chief Scientific Officer at UST AlphaAI.
He has over two and a half decades of industry experience and enjoys working with data to influence behavioral outcomes.
As an entrepreneur, Arnab had a startup focused on industrial applications of AI in healthcare, finance, semiconductor, and retail that he successfully exited post-acquisition. He is an advisor to AI companies and the Chief Scientific Officer at UST AlphaAI. At the University of Chicago, Arnab teaches Machine Learning, Machine Learning Operations, Time Series Analysis and Forecasting, and Data Science in Healthcare.
Arnab has published a book, book chapters, and numerous peer-reviewed conference & journal papers. He enjoys public speaking and has given talks in the US, Australia, Saudi Arabia, and India. He is an avid traveler and has visited the 7 wonders of the world. Arnab holds MS and PhD degrees from the University of Southern California and a BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India.