Predicting Length of Stay for Obstetric Patients via Electronic Medical Records

Cheng Gao*, Abel N. Kho, Catherine Ivory, Sarah Osmundson, Bradley A. Malin, You Chen

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

Obstetric care refers to the care provided to patients during ante-, intra-, and postpartum periods. Predicting length of stay (LOS) for these patients during their hospitalizations can assist healthcare organizations in allocating hospital resources more effectively and efficiently, ultimately improving maternal care quality and reducing costs to patients. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which LOS can be forecast from a patient's medical history. We introduce a machine learning framework to incorporate a patient's prior conditions (e.g., diagnostic codes) as features in a predictive model for LOS. We evaluate the framework with three years of historical billing data from the electronic medical records of 9188 obstetric patients in a large academic medical center. The results indicate that our framework achieved an average accuracy of 49.3%, which is higher than the baseline accuracy 37.7% (that relies solely on a patient's age). The most predictive features were found to have statistically significant discriminative ability. These features included billing codes for normal delivery (indicative of shorter stay) and antepartum hypertension (indicative of longer stay).

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationMEDINFO 2017
Subtitle of host publicationPrecision Healthcare through Informatics - Proceedings of the 16th World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics
EditorsAdi V. Gundlapalli, Jaulent Marie-Christine, Zhao Dongsheng
PublisherIOS Press BV
Pages1019-1023
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781614998297
DOIs
StatePublished - 2017
Event16th World Congress of Medical and Health Informatics: Precision Healthcare through Informatics, MedInfo 2017 - Hangzhou, China
Duration: Aug 21 2017Aug 25 2017

Publication series

NameStudies in Health Technology and Informatics
Volume245
ISSN (Print)0926-9630
ISSN (Electronic)1879-8365

Other

Other16th World Congress of Medical and Health Informatics: Precision Healthcare through Informatics, MedInfo 2017
Country/TerritoryChina
CityHangzhou
Period8/21/178/25/17

Funding

This research was sponsored in part by NIH grants R01LM010207 and R00LM011933.

Keywords

  • Electronic health records
  • Length of stay
  • Obstetrics

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Biomedical Engineering
  • Health Informatics
  • Health Information Management

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Predicting Length of Stay for Obstetric Patients via Electronic Medical Records'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this