Duarte, Diego, Walshaw, Christopher ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0253-7779 and Ramesh, Nadarajah ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6373-2557 (2021) A comparison of time-series predictions for healthcare emergency department indicators and the impact of COVID-19. Applied Sciences, 11 (8):3561. pp. 1-17. ISSN 2076-3417 (Online) (doi:10.3390/app11083561)

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Abstract

Across the world, healthcare systems are under stress and this has been hugely exacerbated by the COVID pandemic. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), usually in the form of time-series data, are used to help manage that stress. Making reliable predictions of these indicators, particularly for emergency departments (ED), can facilitate acute unit planning, enhance quality of care and optimise resources. This motivates models that can forecast relevant KPIs and this paper addresses that need by comparing the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) method, a purely statistical model, to Prophet, a decomposable forecasting model based on trend, seasonality and holidays variables, and to the General Regression Neural Network (GRNN), a machine learning model. The dataset analysed is formed of four hourly valued indicators from a UK hospital: Patients in Department; Number of Attendances; Unallocated Patients with a DTA (Decision to Admit); Medically Fit for Discharge. Typically, the data exhibit regular patterns and seasonal trends and can be impacted by external factors such as the weather or major incidents. The COVID pandemic is an extreme instance of the latter and the behaviour of sample data changed dramatically. The capacity to quickly adapt to these changes is crucial and is a factor that shows better results for GRNN in both accuracy and reliability.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Uncontrolled Keywords:	healthcare; COVID; time-series predictions; machine learning; ARIMA; Prophet; GRNN
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Engineering & Science Faculty of Engineering & Science > School of Computing & Mathematical Sciences (CMS) Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences > Computational Science & Engineering Group (CSEH)
Related URLs:	Publisher
Last Modified:	23 May 2022 10:12
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/32256

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