Accurate and comprehensive healthcare data coupled with modern analytical tools can play a vital role in enabling care providers to make better-informed decisions, leading to effective and cost-efficient care delivery. This paper describes a novel strategic healthcare analysis and research platform that encapsulates 360-degree pseudo-anonymized data covering clinical, operational capacity and financial data on over 500,000 patients treated since 2009 across all care delivery units in the county of Halland, Sweden. The over-arching goal is to develop a comprehensive healthcare data infrastructure that captures complete care processes at individual, organizational and population levels. These longitudinal linked healthcare data are a valuable tool for research in a broad range of areas including health economy and process development using real world evidence.

Key messages

Structured and standardized variables have been linked from different regional healthcare sources into a research information platform including all healthcare visits in the county of Halland in Sweden, from 2009 to date.

Since 2015, the regional information platform integrates a cost component to each healthcare visit: thus being able to quantify patient level value, safety and cost efficiency across the continuum of care. © The Author(s) 2020; all rights reserved. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association

Background: Aggressive treatment at end-of-life (EOL) can be traumatic to patients and may not add clinical benefit. Absent an accurate prognosis of death, individual level biases may prevent timely discussions about the scope of EOL care and patients are at risk of being subject to care against their desire. The aim of this work is to develop predictive algorithms for identifying patients at EOL, with clinically meaningful discriminatory power.

Methods: Retrospective, population-based study of patients utilizing emergency departments (EDs) in Sweden, Europe. Electronic health records (EHRs) were used to train supervised learning algorithms to predict all-cause mortality within 30 days following ED discharge. Algorithm performance was validated out of sample on EHRs from a separate hospital, to which the algorithms were previously unexposed.

Results: Of 65,776 visits in the development set, 136 (0.21%) experienced the outcome. The algorithm with highest discrimination attained ROC-AUC 0.945 (95% CI 0.933 - 0.956), with sensitivity 0.869 (95% CI 0.802, 0.931) and specificity 0.858 (0.855, 0.860) on the validation set.

Conclusions: Multiple algorithms displayed excellent discrimination and outperformed available indexes for short-term mortality prediction. The practical utility of the algorithms increases as the required data were captured electronically and did not require de novo data collection.

Trial registration number: Not applicable.

Unscheduled 30-day readmissions are a hallmark of Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) patients that pose significant health risks and escalate care cost. In order to reduce readmissions and curb the cost of care, it is important to initiate targeted intervention programs for patients at risk of readmission. This requires identifying high-risk patients at the time of discharge from hospital. Here, using real data from over 7,500 CHF patients hospitalized between 2012 and 2016 in Sweden, we built and tested a deep learning framework to predict 30-day unscheduled readmission. We present a cost-sensitive formulation of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network using expert features and contextual embedding of clinical concepts. This study targets key elements of an Electronic Health Record (EHR) driven prediction model in a single framework: using both expert and machine derived features, incorporating sequential patterns and addressing the class imbalance problem. We show that the model with all key elements achieves a higher discrimination ability (AUC 0.77) compared to the rest. Additionally, we present a simple financial analysis to estimate annual savings if targeted interventions are offered to high risk patients. © 2019 The Authors