Empowering Community Clinical Triage through Innovative Data-Driven Machine Learning

Binu M. Suresh, Nitsa J. Herzog

Efficient triaging and referral assessments are critical in ensuring prompt medical intervention in the community healthcare (CHC) system. However, the existing triaging systems in many community health services are an intensive, time-consuming process and often lack accuracy, particularly for various symptoms which might represent heart failure or other health-threatening conditions. There is a noticeable limit of research papers describing AI technologies for triaging patients. This paper proposes a novel quantitative data-driven approach using machine learning (ML) modelling to improve the community clinical triaging process. Furthermore, this study aims to employ the feature selection process and machine learning power to reduce the triaging process’s waiting time and increase accuracy in clinical decision making. The model was trained on medical records from a dataset of patients with “Heart Failure”, which included demographics, past medical history, vital signs, medications, and clinical symptoms. A comparative study was conducted using a variety of machine learning algorithms, where XGBoost demonstrated the best performance among the other ML models. The triage levels of 2,35,982 patients achieved an accuracy of 99.94%, a precision of 0.9986, a recall of 0.9958, and an F1-score of 0.9972. The proposed diagnostic model can be implemented for the CHC decision system and be developed further for other medical conditions.