Identification of avoidable patients at triage in a Paediatric Emergency Department: a decision support system using predictive analytics

Abstract

Abstract Background Crowding has been a longstanding issue in emergency departments. To address this, a fast-track system for avoidable patients is being implemented in the Paediatric Emergency Department where our study is conducted. Our goal is to develop an optimized Decision Support System that helps in directing patients to this fast track. We evaluated various Machine Learning models, focusing on a balance between complexity, predictive performance, and interpretability. Methods This is a retrospective study considering all visits to a university-affiliated metropolitan hospital’s PED between 2014 and 2019. Using information available at the time of triage, we trained several models to predict whether a visit is avoidable and should be directed to a fast-track area. Results A total of 507,708 visits to the PED were used in the training and testing of the models. Regarding the outcome, 41.6% of the visits were considered avoidable. Except for the classification made by triage rules, i.e. considering levels 1,2, and 3 as non-avoidable and 4 and 5 as avoidable, all models had similar results in model’s evaluation metrics, e.g. Area Under the Curve ranging from 74% to 80%. Conclusions Regarding predictive performance, the pruned decision tree had evaluation metrics results that were comparable to the other ML models. Furthermore, it offers a low complexity and easy to implement solution. When considering interpretability, a paramount requisite in healthcare since it relates to the trustworthiness and transparency of the system, the pruned decision tree excels. Overall, this paper contributes to the growing body of research on the use of machine learning in healthcare. It highlights practical benefits for patients and healthcare systems of the use ML-based DSS in emergency medicine. Moreover, the obtained results can potentially help to design patients’ flow management strategies in PED settings, which has been sought as a solution for addressing the long-standing problem of overcrowding.