Patient Event Sequences for Predicting Hospitalization Length of Stay

Abstract

Predicting patients’ hospital length of stay (LOS) is essential for improving resource allocation and supporting decision-making in healthcare organizations. This paper proposes a novel transformer-based model, termed Medic-BERT (M-BERT), for predicting LOS by modeling patient information as sequences of events. We performed empirical experiments on a cohort of 48k emergency care patients from a large Danish hospital. Experimental results show that M-BERT can achieve high accuracy on a variety of LOS problems and outperforms traditional non-sequence-based machine learning approaches.