Predicting Patient Hospitalization after Emergency Readmission

ABSTRACT Emergency Departments (ED) suffer heavy overload due to lack of primary attention service. Increasingly geriatric admissions pose specific problems contributing to this overload. A consequence is the increase of patient returning short time after discharge, i.e., readmissions, sometimes requiring hospitalization. In this latter case the patient problem was not solved in the first admission and the condition has aggravated. The time threshold defining a patient comeback as readmission varies; therefore we have considered several such thresholds in our prediction experiments. Prediction of hospitalization following ED readmission is posed over a heavily imbalanced class distribution, so we have considered several approaches to deal with imbalanced datasets and several base classifiers, as well as performance measures that enhance the critical comparison between approaches. Experimental works are carried out on real data from a university hospital in Santiago, Chile, corresponding to a period of 3 years, including pediatric and adult admissions to the ED. We achieve results that encourage the development of real life application of the data balancing and classification approach for prediction of hospitalization after readmission.