Predicting Imminent Health Outcomes from Common Lab Results

In recent years, most hospitals have implemented Electronic Health Records to manage and integrate a wide range of medical information, including diagnostics, medication admission and laboratory test results. Certain laboratory variables may serve as indicators of a patient’s clinical deterioration, making laboratory data a valuable tool for identifying high-risk patients. This work introduces a framework for predicting imminent health outcomes (IHO) of multimorbidity patients using laboratory test data. Our cohort includes 322,316 multimorbidity patients that performed laboratory tests in a large teaching hospital between January 2007 and August 2021. Two Imminent Health Outcomes predictive tools were developed. The first considers all patients in the dataset. The second was developed using a subset of patients with Heart Failure (HF) as the main comorbidity (5% of the entire dataset), considering that HF is a highly prevalent syndrome in multimorbidity patients. This predictive model achieved a reasonable predictive performance ( AUROC = 0.718, 95% CI 0.708-0.756, and AUPRC = 0.663, 95% CI 0.630-0.701). C-reactive protein and NT-proBNP are the lab tests that most positively contribute to the prediction of IHO. The IHO predictive tool has the potential to help the medical team identify patients at high-risk of an imminent adverse event, highlighting the laboratory variables that are most contributing to the deterioration of the patient.