Srijan Sengupta, DAC faculty member in the department of statistics

Reports that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States have led the Institute of Medicine and several state legislatures to suggest that data from patient safety event reporting systems could help health care providers better understand safety hazards and, ultimately, improve patient care.

“Tens of thousands of these safety report databases provide a free text field that does not constrain the reporter to fixed, predefined categories,” said Srijan Sengupta, assistant professor of statistics in the College of Science and a faculty member at the Discovery Analytics Center.

Sengupta has received an $815,218 Research Project Grant (R01) from the National Institutes of Health to develop novel statistical methods to analyze such unstructured data in safety reports. Click here to read more about Senputa’s grant.