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Predicting scheduled hospital attendance with artificial intelligence

Nelson, A; Herron, D; Rees, G; Nachev, P; (2019) Predicting scheduled hospital attendance with artificial intelligence. npj Digital Medicine , 2 (1) , Article 26. 10.1038/s41746-019-0103-3. Green open access

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Abstract

Failure to attend scheduled hospital appointments disrupts clinical management and consumes resource estimated at £1 billion annually in the United Kingdom National Health Service alone. Accurate stratification of absence risk can maximize the yield of preventative interventions. The wide multiplicity of potential causes, and the poor performance of systems based on simple, linear, low-dimensional models, suggests complex predictive models of attendance are needed. Here, we quantify the effect of using complex, non-linear, high-dimensional models enabled by machine learning. Models systematically varying in complexity based on logistic regression, support vector machines, random forests, AdaBoost, or gradient boosting machines were trained and evaluated on an unselected set of 22,318 consecutive scheduled magnetic resonance imaging appointments at two UCL hospitals. Highdimensional Gradient Boosting Machine-based models achieved the best performance reported in the literature, exhibiting an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.852 and average precision of 0.511. Optimal predictive performance required 81 variables. Simulations showed net potential benefit across a wide range of attendance characteristics, peaking at £3.15 per appointment at current prevalence and call efficiency. Optimal attendance prediction requires more complex models than have hitherto been applied in the field, reflecting the complex interplay of patient, environmental, and operational causal factors. Far from an exotic luxury, high-dimensional models based on machine learning are likely essential to optimal scheduling amongst other operational aspects of hospital care. High predictive performance is achievable with data from a single institution, obviating the need for aggregating large-scale sensitive data across governance boundaries.

Type: Article
Title: Predicting scheduled hospital attendance with artificial intelligence
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1038/s41746-019-0103-3
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-019-0103-3
Language: English
Additional information: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology > Brain Repair and Rehabilitation
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10077652
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