Abstract
We have previously described a system for monitoring a number of healthcare outcomes using case-mix adjustment models. It is desirable to automate the model fitting process in such a system if monitoring covers a large number of outcome measures or subgroup analyses. Our aim was to compare the performance of three different variable selection strategies: “manual”, “automated” backward elimination and re-categorisation, and including all variables at once, irrespective of their apparent importance, with automated re-categorisation. Logistic regression models for predicting in-hospital mortality and emergency readmission within 28 days were fitted to an administrative database for 78 diagnosis groups and 126 procedures from 1996 to 2006 for National Health Services hospital trusts in England. The performance of models was assessed with Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) c statistics, (measuring discrimination) and Brier score (assessing the average of the predictive accuracy). Overall, discrimination was similar for diagnoses and procedures and consistently better for mortality than for emergency readmission. Brier scores were generally low overall (showing higher accuracy) and were lower for procedures than diagnoses, with a few exceptions for emergency readmission within 28 days. Among the three variable selection strategies, the automated procedure had similar performance to the manual method in almost all cases except low-risk groups with few outcome events. For the rapid generation of multiple case-mix models we suggest applying automated modelling to reduce the time required, in particular when examining different outcomes of large numbers of procedures and diseases in routinely collected administrative health data.
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Funding
MHJ, AB and PA and the Dr Foster Unit at Imperial are principally funded via a research grant by Dr Foster Intelligence, an independent healthcare information company. The Unit is affiliated with the Imperial Centre for Patient Safety and Service Quality at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust which is funded by the National Institute of Health Research and the Centre for Infection Prevention and Management funded by the UK Clinical Research Collaboration. The Department of Primary Care & Public Health at Imperial College is grateful for support from the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre scheme, the NIHR Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research & Care (CLAHRC) Scheme.
Ethics
We have permission from the NIGB under Section 251 of the NHS Act 2006 (formerly Section 60 approval from the Patient Information Advisory Group) to hold confidential data and analyse them for research purposes. Consent was given on behalf of patients since for national data, individual consent is considered unfeasible. We have ethical approval from the South East Research Ethics Committee.
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Jen, MH., Bottle, A., Kirkwood, G. et al. The performance of automated case-mix adjustment regression model building methods in a health outcome prediction setting. Health Care Manag Sci 14, 267–278 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10729-011-9159-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10729-011-9159-6