The Use of Machine Learning to Predict Late Arrivals at the Adult Outpatient Department.

INTRODUCTION: Patient unpunctuality leads to delays in the delivery of care and increased waiting times, resulting in crowdedness. Late arrivals for adult outpatient appointments are a challenge for healthcare, contributing to negative effects on the efficiency of health services as well as wasted time, budget, and resources. This study aims to identify factors and characteristics associated with tardy arrivals at adult outpatient appointments using machine learning and artificial intelligence. The goal is to create a predictive model using machine learning models capable of predicting adult patients arriving late to their appointments. This would support effective and accurate decision-making in scheduling systems, leading to better utilization and optimization of healthcare resources. METHODS: A retrospective cohort review of adult outpatient appointments between January 1, 2019, and December 31, 2019, was undertaken at a tertiary hospital in Riyadh. Four machine learning models were used to identify the best prediction model that could predict late-arriving patients based on multiple factors. RESULTS: A total of 1,089,943 appointments for 342,974 patients were conducted. There were 128,121 visits (11.7%) categorized as late arrivals. The best prediction model was Random Forest, with a high accuracy of 94.88%, a recall of 99.72%, and a precision of 90.92%. The other models showed different results, such as XGBoost with an accuracy of 68.13%, Logistic Regression with an accuracy of 56.23%, and GBoosting with an accuracy of 68.24%. CONCLUSION: This paper aims to identify the factors associated with late-arriving patients and improve resource utilization and care delivery. Despite the overall good performance of the machine learning models developed in this study, not all variables and factors included contribute significantly to the algorithms' performance. Considering additional variables could improve machine learning performance outcomes, further enhancing the practical application of the predictive model in healthcare settings.

Prediction of ICU Patients' Deterioration Using Machine Learning Techniques.

INTRODUCTION: Assessing vital sign measurements within hospital settings presents a valuable opportunity for data analysis and knowledge extraction. By generating adaptable, personalized prediction models of patient vital signs, these models can yield clinically relevant insights not achievable through population-based models. This study aims to compare several statistical forecasting models to determine their real-life applicability. OBJECTIVES: The primary objectives of this paper are to evaluate whether the following measurements: blood pressure, oxygen saturation, temperature and heart rate can predict deterioration in Intensive Care Unit (ICU) patients. Additionally, we aim to identify which of these measurements contributes most significantly to our prediction. Lastly, we seek to determine the most accurate data mining technique for real-life data applications. METHODS: This retrospective chart review study utilized data from patients admitted to the ICU at a tertiary hospital between January and December, 2019. Data mining techniques for prediction included logistic regression, support vector machine classifier, k-nearest neighbors (KNN), gradient boosting classifier, and Naive Bayes classifier. A comprehensive comparison of these techniques was performed, focusing on accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure. RESULTS: To achieve the research objectives, the SelectKBest class was applied to extract the most contributory features for prediction. Blood pressure ranked first with a score of 9.98, followed by respiratory rate, temperature, and heart rate. Analysis of 653 patient records indicated that 129 patients expired, while 542 patients were discharged either to their homes or other facilities. Among the five training models, two demonstrated the highest accuracy in predicting patient deterioration or survival at 88.83% and 84.72%, respectively. The gradient boosting classifier accurately predicted 115 out of 129 expired patients, while the KNN correctly predicted 109 out of 129 expired patients. CONCLUSION: Machine learning has the potential to enhance clinical deterioration prediction compared to traditional methods. This allows healthcare professionals to implement preventative measures and improve patients' quality of life, ultimately increasing average life expectancy. Although our research focused exclusively on ICU patients, data mining techniques can be applied in various contexts both within and outside the hospital setting.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning During the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Review.

Covid-19 is one of the most significant infectious diseases that have faced humanity in the past century from clinical, economic, and social perspectives. Although the role of infectious diseases in human history has been vicious and is well known to humanity, Covid-19 is a special case since it is the first worldwide outbreak in the era of advanced computing and telecommunications. For this reason, it was only logical to see Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) on the top of the list of controls to compact the spread of Covid-19. This paper goes through the applications of AI and ML that were reported in some of the major literature indexes and can be related to the main issues that face healthcare providers during the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper also discusses the applicability of these applications to healthcare organizations and points out the main prerequisites before they can be adopted.

A Machine Learning Model for Predicting the Risk of Readmission in Community-Acquired Pneumonia.

Background Pneumonia is a common respiratory infection that affects all ages, with a higher rate anticipated as age increases. It is a disease that impacts patient health and the economy of the healthcare institution. Therefore, machine learning methods have been used to guide clinical judgment in disease conditions and can recognize patterns based on patient data. This study aims to develop a prediction model for the readmission risk within 30 days of patient discharge after the management of community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). Methodology Univariate and multivariate logistic regression were used to identify the statistically significant factors that are associated with the readmission of patients with CAP. Multiple machine learning models were used to predict the readmission of CAP patients within 30 days by conducting a retrospective observational study on patient data. The dataset was obtained from the Hospital Information System of a tertiary healthcare organization across Saudi Arabia. The study included all patients diagnosed with CAP from 2016 until the end of 2018. Results The collected data included 8,690 admission records related to CAP for 5,776 patients (2,965 males, 2,811 females). The results of the analysis showed that patient age, heart rate, respiratory rate, medication count, and the number of comorbidities were significantly associated with the odds of being readmitted. All other variables showed no significant effect. We ran four algorithms to create the model on our data. The decision tree gave high accuracy of 83%, while support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and logistic regression provided better accuracy of 90%. However, because the dataset was unbalanced, the precision and recall for readmission were zero for all models except the decision tree with 16% and 18%, respectively. By applying the Synthetic Minority Oversampling TEchnique technique to balance the training dataset, the results did not change significantly; the highest precision achieved was 16% in the SVM model. RF achieved the highest recall with 45%, but without any advantage to this model because the accuracy was reduced to 65%. Conclusions Pneumonia is an infectious disease with major health and economic complications. We identified that less than 10% of patients were readmitted for CAP after discharge; in addition, we identified significant predictors. However, our study did not have enough data to develop a proper machine learning prediction model for the risk of readmission.

Leveraging Advanced Data Analytics to Predict the Risk of All-Cause Seven-Day Emergency Readmissions.

Introduction Emergency readmissions have been a long-time, multifaceted, unsolved problem. Developing a predictive model calibrated with hospital-specific Electronic Health Record (EHR) data could give higher prediction accuracy and insights into high-risk patients for readmission. Thus, we need to proactively introduce the necessary interventions. This study aims to investigate the relationship between features that consider significant predictors of at-risk patients for seven-day readmission through logistic regression in addition to developing several machine learning models to test the predictability of those attributes using EHR data in a Saudi Arabia-specific ED context. Methods Univariate and multivariate logistic regression has been used to identify the most statistically significant features that contributed to classifying readmitted and not readmitted patients. Seven different machine learning models were trained and tested, and a comparison between the best-performing model was conducted in terms of five performance metrics. To construct the prediction model and internally validate it, the processed dataset was split into two sets: 70% for the training set and 30% for the test set or validation set. Results XGBoost achieved the highest accuracy (64%) in predicting early seven-day readmissions. Catboost was the second-best predictive model at 61%. XGBoost achieved the highest specificity at 70%, and all the models had a sensitivity of 57% except for XGBoost and Catboost at 32% and 38%, respectively. All predictive attributes, patient age, length of stay (LOS) in minutes, visit time (AM), marital status (married), number of medications, and number of abnormal lab results were significant predictors of early seven-day readmissions while marital status and number of vital-sign instabilities at discharge were not statistically significant predictors of seven-day readmission. Conclusion Although XGBoost and Catboost showed good accuracy, none of the models achieved good discriminative ability in terms of sensitivity and specificity. Thus, none can be clinically used for predicting early seven-day readmission. More predictive variables need to be fed into the model, specifically predictors approximate to the day of discharge, in order to optimize the model's performance.