Use of Electronic Health Data for Disease Prediction: A Comprehensive Literature Review

Disease prediction has the potential to benefit stakeholders such as the government and health insurance companies. It can identify patients at risk of disease or health conditions. Clinicians can then take appropriate measures to avoid or minimize the risk and in turn, improve quality of care and avoid potential hospital admissions. Due to the recent advancement of tools and techniques for data analytics, disease risk prediction can leverage large amounts of semantic information, such as demographics, clinical diagnosis and measurements, health behaviours, laboratory results, prescriptions and care utilisation. In this regard, electronic health data can be a potential choice for developing disease prediction models. A significant number of such disease prediction models have been proposed in the literature over time utilizing large-scale electronic health databases, different methods, and healthcare variables. The goal of this comprehensive literature review was to discuss different risk prediction models that have been proposed based on electronic health data. Search terms were designed to find relevant research articles that utilized electronic health data to predict disease risks. Online scholarly databases were searched to retrieve results, which were then reviewed and compared in terms of the method used, disease type, and prediction accuracy. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the use of electronic health data for risk prediction models. A comparison of the results from different techniques for three frequently modelled diseases using electronic health data was also discussed in this study. In addition, the advantages and disadvantages of different risk prediction models, as well as their performance, were presented. Electronic health data have been widely used for disease prediction. A few modelling approaches show very high accuracy in predicting different diseases using such data. These modelling approaches have been used to inform the clinical decision process to achieve better outcomes.