Prediction of patient evolution in terms of Clinical Risk Groups form routinely collected data using machine learning

Chronicity is a problem that is affecting quality of life and increasing healthcare costs worldwide. Predictive tools can help mitigate these effects by encouraging the patients' and healthcare system's proactivity. This research work uses supervised learning techniques to build a predictive model of the healthcare status of a chronic patient, using Clinical Risk Groups (CRGs) as a measure of chronicity and prescription and diagnosis data as predictors. The model is addressed to the whole population in our healthcare system regardless of the disease, as data used are widely available in a consistent way for all patients. We explore different ways to encode data that are appropriate for machine learning. Results suggest that these data alone can be used to build accurate models, and show that, in our set, prescription information has a higher predictive value than diagnosis.