Patient length of stay and mortality prediction: A survey

Abstract

Over the past few years, there has been increased interest in data mining and machine learning methods to improve hospital performance, in particular hospitals want to improve their intensive care unit statistics by reducing the number of patients dying inside the intensive care unit. Research has focused on prediction of measurable outcomes, including risk of complications, mortality and length of hospital stay. The length of stay is an important metric both for healthcare providers and patients, influenced by numerous factors. In particular, the length of stay in critical care is of great significance, both to patient experience and the cost of care, and is influenced by factors specific to the highly complex environment of the intensive care unit. The length of stay is often used as a surrogate for other outcomes, where those outcomes cannot be measured; for example as a surrogate for hospital or intensive care unit mortality. The length of stay is also a parameter, which has been used to identify the severity of illnesses and healthcare resource utilisation. This paper examines a range of length of stay and mortality prediction applications in acute medicine and the critical care unit. It also focuses on the methods of analysing length of stay and mortality prediction. Moreover, the paper provides a classification and evaluation for the analytical methods of the length of stay and mortality prediction associated with a grouping of relevant research papers published in the years 1984 to 2016 related to the domain of survival analysis. In addition, the paper highlights some of the gaps and challenges of the domain.

Keywords: critical care; data-driven approach; length of stay prediction; mortality prediction; multi-stage models; statistical methods.