Predicting benzodiazepine prescriptions: A proof-of-concept machine learning approach

INTRODUCTION: Benzodiazepines are the most commonly prescribed psychotropic medications, but they may place users at risk of serious adverse effects. Developing a method to predict benzodiazepine prescriptions could assist in prevention efforts. METHODS: The present study applies machine learning methods to de-identified electronic health record data, in order to develop algorithms for predicting benzodiazepine prescription receipt (yes/no) and number of benzodiazepine prescriptions (0, 1, 2+) at a given encounter. Support-vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF) approaches were applied to outpatient psychiatry, family medicine, and geriatric medicine data from a large academic medical center. The training sample comprised encounters taking place between January 2020 and December 2021 (N = 204,723 encounters); the testing sample comprised data from encounters taking place between January and March 2022 (N = 28,631 encounters). The following empirically-supported features were evaluated: anxiety and sleep disorders (primary anxiety diagnosis, any anxiety diagnosis, primary sleep diagnosis, any sleep diagnosis), demographic characteristics (age, gender, race), medications (opioid prescription, number of opioid prescriptions, antidepressant prescription, antipsychotic prescription), other clinical variables (mood disorder, psychotic disorder, neurocognitive disorder, prescriber specialty), and insurance status (any insurance, type of insurance). We took a step-wise approach to developing a prediction model, wherein Model 1 included only anxiety and sleep diagnoses, and each subsequent model included an additional group of features. RESULTS: For predicting benzodiazepine prescription receipt (yes/no), all models showed good to excellent overall accuracy and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) for both SVM (Accuracy = 0.868–0.883; AUC = 0.864–0.924) and RF (Accuracy = 0.860–0.887; AUC = 0.877–0.953). Overall accuracy was also high for predicting number of benzodiazepine prescriptions (0, 1, 2+) for both SVM (Accuracy = 0.861–0.877) and RF (Accuracy = 0.846–0.878). DISCUSSION: Results suggest SVM and RF algorithms can accurately classify individuals who receive a benzodiazepine prescription and can separate patients by the number of benzodiazepine prescriptions received at a given encounter. If replicated, these predictive models could inform system-level interventions to reduce the public health burden of benzodiazepines.