Dynamic prediction of hospital admission with medical claim data

BACKGROUND: Congestive heart failure is one of the most common reasons those aged 65 and over are hospitalized in the United States, which has caused a considerable economic burden. The precise prediction of hospitalization caused by congestive heart failure in the near future could prevent possible hospitalization, optimize the medical resources, and better meet the healthcare needs of patients. METHODS: To fully utilize the monthly-updated claim feed data released by The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), we present a dynamic random survival forest model adapted for periodically updated data to predict the risk of adverse events. We apply our model to dynamically predict the risk of hospital admission among patients with congestive heart failure identified using the Accountable Care Organization Operational System Claim and Claim Line Feed data from Feb 2014 to Sep 2015. We benchmark the proposed model with two commonly used models in medical application literature: the cox proportional model and logistic regression model with L-1 norm penalty. RESULTS: Results show that our model has high Area-Under-the-ROC-Curve across time points and C-statistics. In addition to the high performance, it provides measures of variable importance and individual-level instant risk. CONCLUSION: We present an efficient model adapted for periodically updated data such as the monthly updated claim feed data released by CMS to predict the risk of hospitalization. In addition to processing big-volume periodically updated stream-like data, our model can capture event onset information and time-to-event information, incorporate time-varying features, provide insights of variable importance and have good prediction power. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first work combining sliding window technique with the random survival forest model. The model achieves remarkable performance and could be easily deployed to monitor patients in real time. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12911-019-0734-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.