Developing a decision support tool to predict delayed discharge from hospitals using machine learning

BACKGROUND: The growing demand for healthcare services challenges patient flow management in health systems. Alternative Level of Care (ALC) patients who no longer need acute care yet face discharge barriers contribute to prolonged stays and hospital overcrowding. Predicting these patients at admission allows for better resource planning, reducing bottlenecks, and improving flow. This study addresses three objectives: identifying likely ALC patients, key predictive features, and preparing guidelines for early ALC identification at admission. METHODS: Data from Nova Scotia Health (2015-2022) covering patient demographics, diagnoses, and clinical information was extracted. Data preparation involved managing outliers, feature engineering, handling missing values, transforming categorical variables, and standardizing. Data imbalance was addressed using class weights, random oversampling, and the Synthetic Minority Over-Sampling Technique (SMOTE). Three ML classifiers, Random Forest (RF), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGB), were tested to classify patients as ALC or not. Also, to ensure accurate ALC prediction at admission, only features available at that time were used in a separate model iteration. RESULTS: Model performance was assessed using recall, F1-Score, and AUC metrics. The XGB model with SMOTE achieved the highest performance, with a recall of 0.95 and an AUC of 0.97, excelling in identifying ALC patients. The next best models were XGB with random oversampling and ANN with class weights. When limited to admission-only features, the XGB with SMOTE still performed well, achieving a recall of 0.91 and an AUC of 0.94, demonstrating its effectiveness in early ALC prediction. Additionally, the analysis identified diagnosis 1, patient age, and entry code as the top three predictors of ALC status. CONCLUSIONS: The results demonstrate the potential of ML models to predict ALC status at admission. The findings support real-time decision-making to improve patient flow and reduce hospital overcrowding. The ALC guideline groups patients first by diagnosis, then by age, and finally by entry code, categorizing prediction outcomes into three probability ranges: below 30%, 30-70%, and above 70%. This framework assesses whether ALC status can be accurately predicted at admission or during the patient's stay before discharge.

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