Sociomarkers and biomarkers: predictive modeling in identifying pediatric asthma patients at risk of hospital revisits

Journal Article · 01 October 2018 · npj Digital Medicine

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-018-0056-y · OSTI ID:1629462

Shin, Eun Kyong ^[1]; Mahajan, Ruhi ^[2]; Akbilgic, Oguz  ^[3]; Shaban-Nejad, Arash  ^[2]

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1. Univ. of Tennessee Health Science Center – Oak Ridge National Laboratory- (UTHSC-ORNL), Memphis, TN (United States). Center for Biomedical Informatics and the Dept. of Pediatrics; University of Tennessee Health Science Center
2. Univ. of Tennessee Health Science Center – Oak Ridge National Laboratory- (UTHSC-ORNL), Memphis, TN (United States). Center for Biomedical Informatics and the Dept. of Pediatrics
3. Univ. of Tennessee Health Science Center – Oak Ridge National Laboratory- (UTHSC-ORNL), Memphis, TN (United States). Center for Biomedical Informatics and the Dept. of Pediatrics; UTHSC Dept. of Preventative Medicine, Memphis, TN (United States).

The importance of social components of health has been emphasized both in epidemiology and public health. This paper highlights the significant impact of social components on health outcomes in a novel way. Introducing the concept of sociomarkers, which are measurable indicators of social conditions in which a patient is embedded, we employed a machine learning approach that uses both biomarkers and sociomarkers to identify asthma patients at risk of a hospital revisit after an initial visit with an accuracy of 66%. The analysis has been performed over an integrated dataset consisting of individual-level patient information such as gender, race, insurance type, and age, along with ZIP code-level sociomarkers such as poverty level, blight prevalence, and housing quality. Using this uniquely integrated database, we then compare the traditional biomarker-based risk model and the sociomarker-based risk model. A biomarker-based predictive model yields an accuracy of 65% and the sociomarkerbased model predicts with an accuracy of 61%. Without knowing specific symptom-related features, the sociomarker-based model can correctly predict two out of three patients at risk. We systematically show that sociomarkers play an important role in predicting health outcomes at the individual level in pediatric asthma cases. Additionally, by merging multiple data sources with detailed neighborhood-level data, we directly measure the importance of residential conditions for predicting individual health outcomes.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• Grant/Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 1629462
• Journal Information: npj Digital Medicine, Journal Name: npj Digital Medicine Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 1; ISSN 2398-6352
• Publisher: Springer NatureCopyright Statement
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English