Predicting Inpatient Discharge Prioritization With Electronic Health Records
This work addresses hospital resource management and care quality by enabling better discharge planning, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a specific healthcare domain.
The study tackled the problem of predicting which hospital inpatients will be discharged within 24 hours using Electronic Health Records data, achieving an AUROC of 0.85 and AUPRC of 0.53 on a test set.
Identifying patients who will be discharged within 24 hours can improve hospital resource management and quality of care. We studied this problem using eight years of Electronic Health Records (EHR) data from Stanford Hospital. We fit models to predict 24 hour discharge across the entire inpatient population. The best performing models achieved an area under the receiver-operator characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.85 and an AUPRC of 0.53 on a held out test set. This model was also well calibrated. Finally, we analyzed the utility of this model in a decision theoretic framework to identify regions of ROC space in which using the model increases expected utility compared to the trivial always negative or always positive classifiers.