Predicting hospital admission for Emergency Department patients using a Bayesian network

Hospital admission delays in the Emergency Department (ED) reduce volume capacity and contribute to the nation's ED diversion problem. This study evaluated the accuracy of a Bayesian network for the early prediction of hospital admission status using data from 16,900 ED encounters. The final model included nine variables that are commonly available in many ED settings. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.894 (95% CI: 0.887-0.902) for the validation set. The system had high accuracy an may be used to alert clinicians to initiate admission processes earlier during a patient's ED encounter.