The use of analytic hierarchy process for measuring the complexity of medical diagnosis

Diagnostic complexity is an important contextual factor affecting a variety of medical outcomes. Existing measurements of diagnosis complexity either rely on crude proxies or use fine-grained measures that employ indicators from proprietary data that are not readily available. Hence, the study of th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Health informatics journal 2020-03, Vol.26 (1), p.218-232
Main Authors: Ben-Assuli, Ofir, Kumar, Nanda, Arazy, Ofer, Shabtai, Itamar
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Health informatics
Medical diagnosis
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Summary:Diagnostic complexity is an important contextual factor affecting a variety of medical outcomes. Existing measurements of diagnosis complexity either rely on crude proxies or use fine-grained measures that employ indicators from proprietary data that are not readily available. Hence, the study of this important construct in fields such as medical informatics has been hampered by the difficulty of measuring diagnostic complexity. This article presents a novel approach for conceptualizing and operationalizing diagnostic task complexity as a multi-dimensional construct, which employs the readily available International Classification of Diseases codes from medical encounters in hospitals and uses Analytic Hierarchical Process methodology. We demonstrate the reliability of the proposed approach and show that despite using a relatively simple procedure, it is able to predict readmission rates just as well as (or even better) than some of the sophisticated measures that have been used in recent studies (namely, the LaCE score index).
ISSN:1460-4582
1741-2811
DOI:10.1177/1460458218824708