Predictive Modeling for Comfortable Death Outcome Using Electronic Health Records

Electronic health record (EHR) systems are used in healthcare industry to observe the progress of patients. With fast growth of the data, EHR data analysis has become a big data problem. Most EHRs are sparse and multi-dimensional datasets and mining them is a challenging task due to a number of reasons. In this paper, we have used a nursing EHR system to build predictive models to determine what factors impact death anxiety, a significant problem for the dying patients. Different existing modeling techniques have been used to develop coarse-grained as well as fine-grained models to predict patient outcomes. The coarse-grained models help in predicting the outcome at the end of each hospitalization, whereas fine-grained models help in predicting the outcome at the end of each shift, therefore providing a trajectory of predicted outcomes. Based on different modeling techniques, our results show significantly accurate predictions, due to relatively noise-free data. These models can help in determining effective treatments, lowering healthcare costs, and improving the quality of end-of-life (EOL) care.