Modeling suicide risk | Harvard Magazine

To comb through the many factors contributing to suicide risk in a more systematic way, Nock (profiled in “A Tragedy and a Mystery,” January-February 2011, page 32) and colleagues have been working on a new approach that uses a computer algorithm. Last September, they published the results of an early algorithm, not yet ready for clinical use, developed using health records from the Partners Healthcare system. The program scanned 1.72 million electronic medical records for every medical code—age, sex, number of doctor’s visits, and each illness or health complaint—that might predict suicide. The resulting model predicted 45 percent of the actual suicide attempts, on average three to four years in advance.