Mortality Predictions on Admission and Organization of Care
Mortality Predictions on Admission and Organization of Care
The primary contribution of our work concerns the number and strength of associations between the probability of dying within 30 days and other events, and the implications for organizing the healthcare delivery model. We also add to the growing evidence that death within 30 days can be accurately predicted at the time of admission from demographic information, modest levels of diagnostic information, and clinical laboratory values. We developed a new prediction rule with excellent accuracy that compares well to a rule recently developed by the Kaiser Permanente system. Feasibility considerations are likely to be the ultimate determinant of which prediction rule a health system chooses. An independent evaluation of the candidate rules applied to the same data is required to compare their accuracy.
These results suggest a context for the coordination of clinical care processes, although mortality risk is not the only domain health systems must address. For illustrative purposes, we will refer to the risk strata shown in Figure 2. After the decisions to admit the patient to the hospital and whether or not surgical intervention is needed, the next decision concerns the level and type of nursing care needed. Recent studies continue to show challenges both with unplanned transfers to intensive care units and care delivered that is consistently concordant with patient wishes. The level of risk for multiple adverse outcomes suggests stratum 1 patients would be the priority group for perfecting the placement and preference assessment process. Our institution is currently piloting an internal placement guideline recommending that nonpalliative patients in the top 2.5 percentile of mortality risk be placed initially in either an intensive or intermediate care unit to receive the potential benefit of higher nursing staffing levels. However, mortality risk cannot be the only criterion used for placement, as demonstrated by its relatively weak association with overall ICU utilization. Our findings may reflect the role of unmeasured factors such as the need for mechanical ventilation, patient preference for comfort care, bed availability, change in patient condition after admission, and inconsistent application of admission criteria.
After the placement decision, the team could decide if the usual level of monitoring, physician rounding, and care coordination would be adequate for the level of risk or whether an additional anticipatory approach is needed. The weak relationship between the risk of death and incidence of complications, although not a new finding, suggests routine surveillance activities need to be conducted on all patients regardless of risk to detect a complication, but that a rescue plan be developed in advance for high mortality risk patients, for example strata 1 and 2, in the event they should develop a complication. Inclusion of the patient's risk strata as part of the routine hand-off communication among hospitalists, nurses, and other team members could provide a succinct common alert for the likelihood of adverse events.
The 30-day mortality risk also informs the transition care plan following hospitalization, given the strong association with death in 180 days and the persistent level of this risk (Figure 3). Again, communication of the risk status (stratum 1) to the team caring for the patient after the hospitalization provides a common reference for prognosis and level of attention needed. However, the prediction accuracy is not sufficient to refer high-risk patients into hospice, but rather, to identify the high-risk subset having the most urgent need to have their preferences for future end-of-life care understood and addressed. The weak relationship of mortality risk with 30-day readmissions indicates that our rule would have a limited role in identifying readmission risk per se. Others have noted the difficulty in accurately predicting readmissions, most likely because the underlying causes are multifactorial. Our results suggest that 1 dynamic for readmission is the risk of dying, and so the underlying causes of this risk should be addressed in the transition plan.
There are a number of limitations with our study. First, this rule was developed and validated on data from only 2 institutions, assembled retrospectively, with diagnostic information determined from administrative data. One cannot assume the accuracy will carry over to other institutions or when there is diagnostic uncertainty at the time of admission. Second, the 30-day mortality risk should not be used as the sole criterion for determining the service intensity for individual patients because of issues with calibration, interpretation of risk, and confounding. The calibration curves (Figure 2) show the slight underprediction of the risk of dying for high-risk groups. Other studies have also noted problems with precise calibration in validation datasets. Caution is also needed in the interpretation of what it means to be at high risk. Most patients in stratum 1 were alive at 30 days; therefore, being at high risk is not a death sentence. Furthermore, the relative weights of the risk factors reflect (ie, are confounded by) the level of treatment rendered. Some deaths within the higher-risk percentiles undoubtedly occurred in patients choosing a palliative rather than a curative approach, perhaps partially explaining the slight underprediction of deaths. Conversely, the low mortality experienced by patients within the lower-risk strata may indicate the treatment provided was effective. Low mortality risk does not imply less care is needed.
A third limitation is that we have not defined the thresholds of risk that should trigger placement and care intensity, although we provide examples on how this could be done. Each institution will need to calibrate the thresholds and associated decision-making processes according to its own environment. Interested readers can explore the sensitivity and specificity of various thresholds\by using the tables in the Appendix (see the Supporting information, Appendix II, in the online version of this article). Finally, we do not know if identifying the mortality risk on admission will lead to better outcomes
Discussion
The primary contribution of our work concerns the number and strength of associations between the probability of dying within 30 days and other events, and the implications for organizing the healthcare delivery model. We also add to the growing evidence that death within 30 days can be accurately predicted at the time of admission from demographic information, modest levels of diagnostic information, and clinical laboratory values. We developed a new prediction rule with excellent accuracy that compares well to a rule recently developed by the Kaiser Permanente system. Feasibility considerations are likely to be the ultimate determinant of which prediction rule a health system chooses. An independent evaluation of the candidate rules applied to the same data is required to compare their accuracy.
These results suggest a context for the coordination of clinical care processes, although mortality risk is not the only domain health systems must address. For illustrative purposes, we will refer to the risk strata shown in Figure 2. After the decisions to admit the patient to the hospital and whether or not surgical intervention is needed, the next decision concerns the level and type of nursing care needed. Recent studies continue to show challenges both with unplanned transfers to intensive care units and care delivered that is consistently concordant with patient wishes. The level of risk for multiple adverse outcomes suggests stratum 1 patients would be the priority group for perfecting the placement and preference assessment process. Our institution is currently piloting an internal placement guideline recommending that nonpalliative patients in the top 2.5 percentile of mortality risk be placed initially in either an intensive or intermediate care unit to receive the potential benefit of higher nursing staffing levels. However, mortality risk cannot be the only criterion used for placement, as demonstrated by its relatively weak association with overall ICU utilization. Our findings may reflect the role of unmeasured factors such as the need for mechanical ventilation, patient preference for comfort care, bed availability, change in patient condition after admission, and inconsistent application of admission criteria.
After the placement decision, the team could decide if the usual level of monitoring, physician rounding, and care coordination would be adequate for the level of risk or whether an additional anticipatory approach is needed. The weak relationship between the risk of death and incidence of complications, although not a new finding, suggests routine surveillance activities need to be conducted on all patients regardless of risk to detect a complication, but that a rescue plan be developed in advance for high mortality risk patients, for example strata 1 and 2, in the event they should develop a complication. Inclusion of the patient's risk strata as part of the routine hand-off communication among hospitalists, nurses, and other team members could provide a succinct common alert for the likelihood of adverse events.
The 30-day mortality risk also informs the transition care plan following hospitalization, given the strong association with death in 180 days and the persistent level of this risk (Figure 3). Again, communication of the risk status (stratum 1) to the team caring for the patient after the hospitalization provides a common reference for prognosis and level of attention needed. However, the prediction accuracy is not sufficient to refer high-risk patients into hospice, but rather, to identify the high-risk subset having the most urgent need to have their preferences for future end-of-life care understood and addressed. The weak relationship of mortality risk with 30-day readmissions indicates that our rule would have a limited role in identifying readmission risk per se. Others have noted the difficulty in accurately predicting readmissions, most likely because the underlying causes are multifactorial. Our results suggest that 1 dynamic for readmission is the risk of dying, and so the underlying causes of this risk should be addressed in the transition plan.
There are a number of limitations with our study. First, this rule was developed and validated on data from only 2 institutions, assembled retrospectively, with diagnostic information determined from administrative data. One cannot assume the accuracy will carry over to other institutions or when there is diagnostic uncertainty at the time of admission. Second, the 30-day mortality risk should not be used as the sole criterion for determining the service intensity for individual patients because of issues with calibration, interpretation of risk, and confounding. The calibration curves (Figure 2) show the slight underprediction of the risk of dying for high-risk groups. Other studies have also noted problems with precise calibration in validation datasets. Caution is also needed in the interpretation of what it means to be at high risk. Most patients in stratum 1 were alive at 30 days; therefore, being at high risk is not a death sentence. Furthermore, the relative weights of the risk factors reflect (ie, are confounded by) the level of treatment rendered. Some deaths within the higher-risk percentiles undoubtedly occurred in patients choosing a palliative rather than a curative approach, perhaps partially explaining the slight underprediction of deaths. Conversely, the low mortality experienced by patients within the lower-risk strata may indicate the treatment provided was effective. Low mortality risk does not imply less care is needed.
A third limitation is that we have not defined the thresholds of risk that should trigger placement and care intensity, although we provide examples on how this could be done. Each institution will need to calibrate the thresholds and associated decision-making processes according to its own environment. Interested readers can explore the sensitivity and specificity of various thresholds\by using the tables in the Appendix (see the Supporting information, Appendix II, in the online version of this article). Finally, we do not know if identifying the mortality risk on admission will lead to better outcomes
