Reduction of Readmissions to Hospitals Based on Actionable Knowledge Discovery and Personalization

In this work, we define procedure paths as the sequence of procedures that a given patient undertakes to reach a desired treatment. In addition to its value as a mean to inform the patient of his or her course of treatment, being able to identify and anticipate procedure paths for new patients is an essential task for examining and evaluating the entire course of treatments in advance, and ultimately rectifying undesired procedure paths accordingly. In this paper, we first introduce two approaches for anticipating the state of the patient that he or she will end up in after performing some procedure p; the state of the patient will consequently indicate the following procedure that the patient is most likely to undergo. By clustering patients into subgroups that exhibit similar properties, we improve the predictability of their procedure paths, which we evaluate by calculating the entropy to measure the level of predictability of following procedure. The clustering approach used is essentially a way of personalizing patients according to their properties. The approach used in this work is entirely novel and was designed specifically to address the twofold problem of first being able to predict following procedures for new patients with high accuracy, and secondly being able to construct such groupings in a way that allows us to identify exactly what it means to transition from one cluster to another. Then, we further devise a metric system that will evaluate the level of desirability for procedures along procedure paths, which we would subsequently map to a metric system for the extracted clusters. This will allow us to find desired transitions between patients in clusters, which would result in reducing the number of anticipated readmissions for new patients.