Imbalanced prediction of emergency department admission using natural language processing and deep neural network

Abstract

The emergency department (ED) plays a very significant role in the hospital. Owing to the rising number of ED visits, medical service points, and ED market, overcrowding of EDs has become serious worldwide. Overcrowding has long been recognized as a vital issue that increases the risk to patients and negative emotions of medical personnel and impacts hospital cost management. For the past years, many researchers have been applying artificial intelligence to reduce crowding situations in the ED. Nevertheless, the datasets in ED hospital admission are naturally inherent with the high-class imbalance in the real world. Previous studies have not considered the imbalance of the datasets, particularly addressing the imbalance. This study purposes to develop a natural language processing model of a deep neural network with an attention mechanism to solve the imbalanced problem in ED admission. The proposed framework is used for predicting hospital admission so that the hospitals can arrange beds early and solve the problem of congestion in the ED. Furthermore, the study compares a variety of methods and obtains the best composition that has the best performance for forecasting hospitalization in ED. The study used the data from a specific hospital in Taiwan as an empirical study. The experimental result demonstrates that almost all imbalanced methods can improve the model’s performance. In addition, the natural language processing model of Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory with attention mechanism has the best results in all-natural language processing methods.