1. Predicting a Need for Financial Assistance in Emergency Department Care
- Author
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Samuel Davis, Rachel Granovsky, Sara Nourazari, and Nasser Fard
- Subjects
emergency department ,Leadership and Management ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Decision tree ,Health Informatics ,Logistic regression ,01 natural sciences ,Article ,Health Information Management ,0502 economics and business ,0101 mathematics ,healthcare finance ,health care economics and organizations ,media_common ,health equity ,Receipt ,Finance ,Government ,business.industry ,Medicaid ,Health Policy ,010102 general mathematics ,05 social sciences ,Emergency department ,Payment ,Health equity ,Medicine ,Business ,predictive modeling ,050203 business & management - Abstract
Identifying patients with a low likelihood of paying their bill serves the needs of patients and providers alike: aligning government programs with their target beneficiaries while minimizing patient frustration and reducing waste among emergency physicians by streamlining the billing process. The goal of this study was to predict the likelihood of patients paying the balance of their emergency department visit bill within 90 days of receipt. Three machine learning methodologies were applied to predict payment: logistic regression, decision tree, and random forest. Models were trained and performance was measured using 1,055,941 patients with non-zero balances across 27 EDs from 1 August 2015 to 31 July 2017. The decision tree accurately predicted 87% of unsuccessful payments, providing significant opportunities to identify patients in need of financial assistance.
- Published
- 2021
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