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Predicting family physicians based on their practice using machine learning | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore

Predicting family physicians based on their practice using machine learning


Abstract:

Significant research has been done in the medical domain using machine learning and clinical data sets. Although there are many interesting and influential clinical resea...Show More

Abstract:

Significant research has been done in the medical domain using machine learning and clinical data sets. Although there are many interesting and influential clinical research works in the fields of healthcare and health services using machine learning, there is a need to apply machine learning in the field of health human resource planning. This study uses physician billing data and machine learning to identify and classify family physicians with the goal of improving health human resource planning. This research is essential for policy makers because it is important to know the number of family physicians practicing in certain geographical regions for providing timely care. Additionally, this issue becomes particularly important when it comes to serving communities with fewer resources such as the rural areas of Northwestern Ontario, where family physicians need to work to their full scope of practice, provide more services than physicians working in urban areas, to meet the needs of patients. In this study, recursive feature elimination method is used to reduce the number of predictors for the classification problems. As the result of this process, the most important features include physician’s rurality, full-time equivalent hours, age, and years of experience. Further, several machine learning models are used to solve binary and multi-class classification problems. Gradient boosting machine learning was the most accurate in predicting family physician practice, with a receiver operating characteristic value, ROC value, of 0.73 and 0.72 for binary and multi-class classification, respectively.
Date of Conference: 15-18 December 2021
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 13 January 2022
ISBN Information:
Conference Location: Orlando, FL, USA

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