Predicting Hospital Stay Length Using Explainable Machine Learning

Efficient bed management minimizes hospital costs and improves efficiency and patient outcomes. This study presents a predictive hospital-ICU length of stay (LOS) framework at admission, where it leverages hospital EHR. Our work utilizes supervised machine learning classification models to predict ICU patients’ LOS in hospital clinical information systems (CIS). Our research marks the first known instance of utilizing explainable artificial intelligence (xAI) for the purpose of explainable machine learning applied to real data collected from hospital stays. We evaluated the predictive classification models using a range of performance metrics (Accuracy, AUC, Sensitivity, Specificity, F1- score, Precision, Recall and more) to predict short and long ICU lengths of stay upon hospital admission. XGBoost predicted short and long LOS with a 98 % AUC. This study shows how hospitals and ICUs might use machine learning to forecast patients on admission. Our study extends clinical information systems for hospitals to provide robust and trustworthy LOS, predictive models by using xAI to explain predictive model outputs.