NHS AI Lab Skunkworks project: Long Stayer Risk Stratification
A pilot project for the NHS AI Lab Skunkworks team, Long Stayer Risk Stratification uses historical data from Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust to predict how long a patient will stay in hospital upon admission.
As the successful candidate from a Dragons’ Den-style project pitch, Long Stayer Risk Stratification was first picked as a pilot project for the AI (Artificial Intelligence) Skunkworks team in April 2021.
Background
Hospital long stayers, those with a length of stay (LoS) of 21 days or longer, have significantly worse medical and
social outcomes than other patients. Long-stayers are often medically optimised (fit for discharge) many days before
their actual discharge. Moreover, there are a complex mixture of medical, cultural and socioeconomic factors which
contribute to the causes of unnecessary long stays.
This repository contains a proof-of-concept demonstrator, developed as part of a research project - a collaboration between Polygeist, Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, NHSX, and
the Home Office’s Accelerated Capability Environment (ACE). The project aimed to achieve two core objectives:
firstly, to determine if an experimental artificial intelligence (AI) approach to predicting hospital long-stayers
was possible; secondly, if so, to produce a proof-of-concept (PoC) risk stratification tool.
Stratification Tool
The tool displays the LTSS for a patient record, between Level 1 and 5; with 5 being the most severe risk of the patient
becoming a long stayer. The tool allows exploration of various factors, and enables the user to edit those entries to produce
refined or hypothetical estimates of the patient's risk.
The tool has shown good risk stratification for real data, with Level 1 consisted of 99% short stayers, and minor
cases, with less than 1% of long-stayers being classified as very low risk. Moreover, 66% of all long-stayers were
classified as Risk Category 4 and 5, with proportions steadily increasing through the categories. Risk Category 5 also
stratified those patients with long and serious hospital stays under the long-stay threshold (serious and lengthy stays).
GitHub
https://github.com/nhsx/skunkworks-long-stayer-risk-stratification
