Machine learning-based prediction of low-value care for hospitalized patients

Low-value care (i.e., costly health care treatments that provide little or no benefit) is an ongoing problem in United States hospitals. Traditional strategies for reducing low-value care are only moderately successful. Informed by behavioral science principles, we sought to use machine learning to inform a targeted prompting system that suggests preferred alternative treatments at the point of care but before clinicians have made a decision.

We used intravenous administration of albumin for fluid resuscitation in intensive care unit (ICU) patients as an exemplar of low-value care practice, identified using the electronic health record of a multi-hospital health system. We divided all ICU episodes into 4-h periods and defined a set of relevant clinical features at the period level. We then developed two machine learning models: a single-stage model that directly predicts if a patient will receive albumin in the next period; and a two-stage model that first predicts if any resuscitation fluid will be administered and then predicts albumin only among the patients with a high probability of fluid use.

We examined 87,489 ICU episodes divided into approximately 1.5 million 4-h periods. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.86 for both prediction models. The positive predictive value was 0.21 (95% confidence interval: 0.20, 0.23) for the single-stage model and 0.22 (0.20, 0.23) for the two-stage model. Applying either model in a targeted prompting system could prevent 10% of albumin administrations, with an attending physician receiving one prompt every 4.2 days of ICU service.

Prediction of low-value care is feasible and could enable a point-of-care, targeted prompting system that offers suggestions ahead of the moment of need before clinicians have already decided. A two-stage approach does not improve performance but does interject new levers for the calibration of such a system.