POLAR Diversion: Using General Practice Data to Calculate Risk of Emergency Department Presentation at the Time of Consultation.

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: This project examined and produced a general practice (GP) based decision support tool (DST), namely POLAR Diversion, to predict a patient's risk of emergency department (ED) presentation. The tool was built using both GP/family practice and ED data, but is designed to operate on GP data alone. METHODS: GP data from 50 practices during a defined time frame were linked with three local EDs. Linked data and data mapping were used to develop a machine learning DST to determine a range of variables that, in combination, led to predictive patient ED presentation risk scores. Thirteen percent of the GP data was kept as a control group and used to validate the tool. RESULTS: The algorith..