Predictive Analysis of Endoscope Demand in Otolaryngology Outpatient Settings

Background: There has been a trend to transit reprocessing of flexible endoscopes from a high-level disinfectant (HLD) centralized manner to sterilization performed by nursing staff in some Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT) clinics. In doing so, the clinic nursing staff are responsible for predicting and managing clinical demand for flexible endoscopes. The HLD disinfection process is time-consuming and requires specialized training and competency to be performed safely. Solely depending on human expertise for predicting the flexible endoscope demands is unreliable and produced a concern of an inadequate supply of devices available for diagnostic purposes. Method: The demand for flexible endoscopes for future patient visits has not been well studied but can be modeled based on patients’ historical information, provider, and other visit-related factors. Such factors are available to the clinic before the visit. Binary classifiers can be used to help inform the sterile processing department of reprocessing needs days or weeks earlier for each patient. Results: Among all our trained models, Logistic Regression reports an average AUC ROC score of 89% and accuracy of 80%. Conclusion: The proposed framework not only significantly reduces the reprocessing efforts in terms of time spent on communication, cleaning, scheduling, and transferring scopes, but also helps to improve patient safety by reducing the exposure risk to potential infections.