How AI can help improve hospital stays and outcomes for older patients with dementia

By using artificial intelligence, Houston Methodist researchers are able to predict hospitalization outcomes of geriatric patients with dementia on the first or second day of hospital admission. This early assessment of outcomes means more timely interventions, better care coordination, more judicious resource allocation, focused care management and timely treatment for these more vulnerable, high-risk patients. Because geriatric patients with dementia have longer hospital stays and incur higher health care costs than other patients, the team sought to solve this problem by identifying modifiable risk factors and developing an artificial intelligence model that improves patient outcomes, enhances their quality of life and reduces their hospital readmission risk, as well as reducing hospitalization costs once the model is put into practice. The study, appearing online Sept. 29 in Alzheimer's & Dementia: Translational Research and Clinical Interventions, looked at the hospital records of 8,407 geriatric patients with dementia over 10 years within Houston Methodist's system of eight hospitals, identifying risk factors for poor outcomes among subgroups of patients with different types of dementia that stem from diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, vascular dementia and Huntington's, among others. From this data, the researchers developed a machine learning model to quickly recognize the predictive risk factors and their ranked importance for undesirable hospitalization outcomes early in the course of these patients' hospital stays.