Evaluation of latent health risk prediction models: A protocol for a mixed-methods study using clinical triage as a vehicle for comparison and discussion (Preprint)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Clinical triage requires integrating multiple information sources to identify patients at risk of deterioration. Tools capturing global health assessments beyond disease-specific scores are being developed using either bottom-up aggregation of simple indicators or top-down machine learning from large datasets. Their alignment with expert clinical judgment remains poorly characterized. Objective This study evaluates 2 latent health measurement approaches: Frailty Index-laboratory, a transparent bottom-up tool aggregating laboratory abnormalities via deficit accumulation theory, and ETHOS-ARES (Enhanced Transformer for Health Outcome Simulation-Adaptive Risk Estimation System), a transformer-based foundation model generating multidimensional patient representations from electronic health records. We assess whether each tool’s severity rankings align with clinical consensus and whether they offer utility in triage decisions. Methods In this 3-phase mixed methods study, at least 30 clinicians across hospital specialties reviewed 20 emergency department presentations derived from Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care IV-Emergency Department. Phase 1 compared unaided clinician severity and urgency judgments against model outputs using Spearman rank correlation, with a Turing-inspired indistinguishability test assessing whether model rankings fell within the distribution of clinician assessments. Phase 2 allocated clinicians to receive Frailty Index-laboratory or ETHOS-ARES outputs, measuring anchoring effects via within-person pre-post comparisons and exploring clinical utility through semistructured interviews analyzed using the Framework Method. Results Ethics approval was granted in June 2025 (KCL Research Ethics Office; MRSP-24/25‐48707). Recruitment began in October 2025 (32 clinicians recruited as of manuscript submission), with data collection expected to be completed in January 2026 and analysis planned for March or April 2026. Conclusions This study will quantify model-clinician agreement, measure anchoring effects, and generate qualitative insights on utility, trust, and adoption. The findings will inform the implementation of latent health measurement tools in clinical practice and provide a framework for the early-stage evaluation of artificial intelligence–based clinical decision support systems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.111 | 0.177 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.087 | 0.015 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".