Early prediction of in-hospital mortality utilizing multivariate predictive modelling of electronic medical records and socio-determinants of health of the first day of hospitalization

BACKGROUND: In France an average of 4% of hospitalized patients die during their hospital stay. To aid medical decision making and the attribution of resources, within a few days of admission the identification of patients at high risk of dying in hospital is essential. METHODS: We used de-identified routine patient data available in the first 2 days of hospitalization in a French University Hospital (between 2016 and 2018) to build models predicting in-hospital mortality (at ≥ 2 and ≤ 30 days after admission). We tested nine different machine learning algorithms with repeated 10-fold cross-validation. Models were trained with 283 variables including age, sex, socio-determinants of health, laboratory test results, procedures (Classification of Medical Acts), medications (Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical code), hospital department/unit and home address (urban, rural etc.). The models were evaluated using various performance metrics. The dataset contained 123,729 admissions, of which the outcome for 3542 was all-cause in-hospital mortality and 120,187 admissions (no death reported within 30 days) were controls. RESULTS: The support vector machine, logistic regression and Xgboost algorithms demonstrated high discrimination with a balanced accuracy of 0.81 (95%CI 0.80–0.82), 0.82 (95%CI 0.80–0.83) and 0.83 (95%CI 0.80–0.83) and AUC of 0.90 (95%CI 0.88–0.91), 0.90 (95%CI 0.89–0.91) and 0.90 (95%CI 0.89–0.91) respectively. The most predictive variables for in-hospital mortality in all three models were older age (greater risk), and admission with a confirmed appointment (reduced risk). CONCLUSION: We propose three highly discriminating machine-learning models that could improve clinical and organizational decision making for adult patients at hospital admission. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12911-023-02356-4.