SCOPE: predicting future diagnoses in office visits using electronic health records

We propose an interpretable and scalable model to predict likely diagnoses at an encounter based on past diagnoses and lab results. This model is intended to aid physicians in their interaction with the electronic health records (EHR). To accomplish this, we retrospectively collected and de-identified EHR data of 2,701,522 patients at Stanford Healthcare over a time period from January 2008 to December 2016. A population-based sample of patients comprising 524,198 individuals (44% M, 56% F) with multiple encounters with at least one frequently occurring diagnosis codes were chosen. A calibrated model was developed to predict ICD-10 diagnosis codes at an encounter based on the past diagnoses and lab results, using a binary relevance based multi-label modeling strategy. Logistic regression and random forests were tested as the base classifier, and several time windows were tested for aggregating the past diagnoses and labs. This modeling approach was compared to a recurrent neural network based deep learning method. The best model used random forest as the base classifier and integrated demographic features, diagnosis codes, and lab results. The best model was calibrated and its performance was comparable or better than existing methods in terms of various metrics, including a median AUROC of 0.904 (IQR [0.838, 0.954]) over 583 diseases. When predicting the first occurrence of a disease label for a patient, the median AUROC with the best model was 0.796 (IQR [0.737, 0.868]). Our modeling approach performed comparably as the tested deep learning method, outperforming it in terms of AUROC (p < 0.001) but underperforming in terms of AUPRC (p < 0.001). Interpreting the model showed that the model uses meaningful features and highlights many interesting associations among diagnoses and lab results. We conclude that the multi-label model performs comparably with RNN based deep learning model while offering simplicity and potentially superior interpretability. While the model was trained and validated on data obtained from a single institution, its simplicity, interpretability and performance makes it a promising candidate for deployment.