Exploring the impact of missingness on racial disparities in predictive performance of a machine learning model for emergency department triage

To investigate how missing data in the patient problem list may impact racial disparities in the predictive performance of a machine learning (ML) model for emergency department (ED) triage. Racial disparities may exist in the missingness of EHR data (eg, systematic differences in access, testing, and/or treatment) that can impact model predictions across racialized patient groups. We use an ML model that predicts patients’ risk for adverse events to produce triage-level recommendations, patterned after a clinical decision support tool deployed at multiple EDs. We compared the model’s predictive performance on sets of observed (problem list data at the point of triage) versus manipulated (updated to the more complete problem list at the end of the encounter) test data. These differences were compared between Black and non-Hispanic White patient groups using multiple performance measures relevant to health equity. There were modest, but significant, changes in predictive performance comparing the observed to manipulated models across both Black and non-Hispanic White patient groups; c-statistic improvement ranged between 0.027 and 0.058. The manipulation produced no between-group differences in c-statistic by race. However, there were small between-group differences in other performance measures, with greater change for non-Hispanic White patients. Problem list missingness impacted model performance for both patient groups, with marginal differences detected by race. Further exploration is needed to examine how missingness may contribute to racial disparities in clinical model predictions across settings. The novel manipulation method demonstrated may aid future research.