Predicting Within-24h Visualisation of Hospital Clinical Reports Using Bayesian Networks

Abstract

Clinical record integration and visualisation is one of the most important abilities of modern health information systems (HIS). Its use on clinical encounters plays a relevant role in the efficacy and efficiency of health care. One solution is to consider a virtual patient record (VPR), created by integrating all clinical records, which must collect documents from distributed departmental HIS. However, the amount of data currently being produced, stored and used in these settings is stressing information technology infrastructure: integrated VPR of central hospitals may gather millions of clinical documents, so accessing data becomes an issue. Our vision is that, making clinical reports to be stored either in primary (fast) or secondary (slower) storage devices according to their likelihood of visualisation can help manage the workload of these systems. The aim of this work was to develop a model that predicts the probability of visualisation, within 24h after production, of each clinical report in the VPR, so that reports less likely to be visualised in the following 24 hours can be stored in secondary devices. We studied log data from an existing virtual patient record (n=4975 reports) with information on report creation and report first-time visualisation dates, along with contextual information. Bayesian network classifiers were built and compared with logistic regression, revealing high discriminating power (AUC around 90%) and accuracy in predicting whether a report is going to be accessed in the 24 hours after creation.