Machine Learning Approaches for Hospital Acquired Pressure Injuries: A Retrospective Study of Electronic Medical Records

BACKGROUND: Many machine learning heuristics integrate well with Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems yet often fail to surpass traditional statistical models for biomedical applications. OBJECTIVE: We sought to compare predictive performances of 12 machine learning and traditional statistical techniques to predict the occurrence of Hospital Acquired Pressure Injuries (HAPI). METHODS: EMR information was collected from 57,227 hospitalizations acquired from Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center (April 2011 to December 2016). Twelve classification algorithms, chosen based upon classic regression and recent machine learning techniques, were trained to predict HAPI incidence and performance was assessed using the Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC). RESULTS: Logistic regression achieved a performance (AUC = 0.91 ± 0.034) comparable to the other machine learning approaches. We report discordance between machine learning derived predictors compared to the traditional statistical model. We visually assessed important patient-specific factors through Shapley Additive Explanations. CONCLUSIONS: Machine learning models will continue to inform clinical decision-making processes but should be compared to traditional modeling approaches to ensure proper utilization. Disagreements between important predictors found by traditional and machine learning modeling approaches can potentially confuse clinicians and need to be reconciled. These developments represent important steps forward in developing real-time predictive models that can be integrated into EMR systems to reduce unnecessary harm.