A machine-learning algorithm to identify hepatitis C in health insurance claims data

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is a leading cause of liver disease-related morbidity and mortality in the United States. Monitoring the burden of chronic HCV infection requires robust methods to identify patients with infection. Insurance claims data are a potentially rich source of information about disease burden, but often lack the laboratory results necessary to define chronic HCV infection. We developed a machine learning-based algorithm to identify patients with chronic HCV infection using health insurance claims alone and compared it a previously developed ICD-9 code-based algorithm.

Objective: We developed a machine learning-based algorithm to identify patients with chronic hepatitis C infection in health insurance claims data.