Using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Neural Networks to Predict Emergency Department Wait Time

Emergency Department (ED) overcrowding is a major global healthcare issue. In this paper, we used Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks to build a model to predict ED wait time in the next 2 hours using a randomly generated patient timestamp dataset of a typical patient hospital journey. Compared with Linear Regression model, the average mean absolute error for the LSTM model is decreased by 15% (3 minutes) (p<0.001). The LSTM model statistically outperforms the LR model, however, both models could be practically useful in ED wait time prediction.