Likely there would be little to no difference, because as it turns out, outcome risk is an awful predictor of benefit, especially among high-risk patients. Many high-risk patients will be readmitted to the hospital anyway, no matter how much preventative care you throw at them. On the other hand, there are potentially many preventable readmissions among ostensibly low-risk patients, and you can prevent more total readmissions by including them in your targeting as opposed to focusing on a tiny high-risk group.(A big part of my current PhD research involves building predictive models for patients with complex needs, so I grapple with these issues day in and day out, and often on huge scales—millions of patients. Prediction, at least in the usual supervised ML sense, just doesn't cut it for these kinds of problems—you need causal inference.)
eyeball|6 years ago
Wouldn’t that depend on what benefit you’re trying to achieve? If you want to prevent re-admissions, wouldn’t it be better to focus on people at high risk if future re-admission vs people with high past complexity. (I assume there would be a lot of, but not perfect overlap)