Predicting Elevated Risk of Hospitalization Following Emergency Department Discharges
This addresses patient safety by helping physicians in emergency departments identify high-risk patients to prevent missed diagnoses and reduce unnecessary hospitalizations, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods.
The paper tackled the problem of predicting hospitalizations after emergency department discharges by applying data mining techniques to a large dataset, achieving high accuracy in predicting hospitalizations within 3, 7, and 14 days.
Hospitalizations that follow closely on the heels of one or more emergency department visits are often symptoms of missed opportunities to form a proper diagnosis. These diagnostic errors imply a failure to recognize the need for hospitalization and deliver appropriate care, and thus also bear important connotations for patient safety. In this paper, we show how data mining techniques can be applied to a large existing hospitalization data set to learn useful models that predict these upcoming hospitalizations with high accuracy. Specifically, we use an ensemble of logistics regression, naïve Bayes and association rule classifiers to successfully predict hospitalization within 3, 7 and 14 days of an emergency department discharge. Aside from high accuracy, one of the advantages of the techniques proposed here is that the resulting classifier is easily inspected and interpreted by humans so that the learned rules can be readily operationalized. These rules can then be easily distributed and applied directly by physicians in emergency department settings to predict the risk of early admission prior to discharging their emergency department patients.