Predicting hospital admission in a pediatric Emergency Department using an Artificial Neural Network

Hospital admission delays in the Emergency Department (ED) reduce capacity and contribute to the ED's diversion problem. We evaluated the accuracy of an Artificial Neural Network for the early prediction of hospital admission using data from 43,077 pediatric ED encounters. We used 9 variables commonly available in the ED setting. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.897 (95% CI: 0.887-0.896). The instrument demonstrated high accuracy and may be used to alert clinicians to initiate admission processes earlier during a patient's ED encounter.