Comparing the performance of screening surveys versus predictive models in identifying patients in need of health-related social need services in the emergency department

Background: Health-related social needs (HRSNs), such as housing instability, food insecurity, and financial strain, are increasingly prevalent among patients. Healthcare organizations must first correctly identify patients with HRSNs to refer them to appropriate services or offer resources to address their HRSNs. Yet, current identification methods are suboptimal, inconsistently applied, and cost prohibitive. Machine learning (ML) predictive modeling applied to existing data sources may be a solution to systematically and effectively identify patients with HRSNs. The performance of ML predictive models using data from electronic health records (EHRs) and other sources has not been compared to other methods of identifying patients needing HRSN services. Methods: A screening questionnaire that included housing instability, food insecurity, transportation barriers, legal issues, and financial strain was administered to adult ED patients at a large safety-net hospital in the mid-Western United States (n = 1,101). We identified those patients likely in need of HRSN-related services within the next 30 days using positive indications from referrals, encounters, scheduling data, orders, or clinical notes. We built an XGBoost classification algorithm using responses from the screening questionnaire to predict HRSN needs (screening questionnaire model). Additionally, we extracted features from the past 12 months of existing EHR, administrative, and health information exchange data for the survey respondents. We built ML predictive models with these EHR data using XGBoost (ML EHR model). Out of concerns of potential bias, we built both the screening question model and the ML EHR model with and without demographic features. Models were assessed on the validation set using sensitivity, specificity, and Area Under the Curve (AUC) values. Models were compared using the Delong test. Results: Almost half (41%) of the patients had a positive indicator for a likely HRSN service need within the next 30 days, as identified through referrals, encounters, scheduling data, orders, or clinical notes. The screening question model had suboptimal performance, with an AUC = 0.580 (95%CI = 0.546, 0.611). Including gender and age resulted in higher performance in the screening question model (AUC = 0.640; 95%CI = 0.609, 0.672). The ML EHR models had higher performance. Without including age and gender, the ML EHR model had an AUC = 0.765 (95%CI = 0.737, 0.792). Adding age and gender did not improve the model (AUC = 0.722; 95%CI = 0.744, 0.800). The screening questionnaire models indicated bias with the highest performance for White non-Hispanic patients. The performance of the ML EHR-based model also differed by race and ethnicity. Conclusion: ML predictive models leveraging several robust EHR data sources outperformed models using screening questions only. Nevertheless, all models indicated biases. Additional work is needed to design predictive models for effectively identifying all patients with HRSNs.