Predicting Clinical Outcomes Across Changing Electronic Health Record Systems

Abstract

Existing machine learning methods typically assume consistency in how semantically equivalent information is encoded. However, the way information is recorded in databases differs across institutions and over time, often rendering potentially useful data obsolescent. To address this problem, we map database-specific representations of information to a shared set of semantic concepts, thus allowing models to be built from or transition across different databases. We demonstrate our method on machine learning models developed in a healthcare setting. In particular, we evaluate our method using two different intensive care unit (ICU) databases and on two clinically relevant tasks, in-hospital mortality and prolonged length of stay. For both outcomes, a feature representation mapping EHR-specific events to a shared set of clinical concepts yields better results than using EHR-specific events alone.