Predictive analytics for 30-day hospital readmissions

The 30-day hospital readmission rate is the percentage of patients who are readmitted within 30 days after the last hospital discharge. Hospitals with high readmission rates would have to pay penalties to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Predicting the readmissions can help the hospital better allocate its resources to reduce the readmission rate. In this research, we use a data set from a hospital in North Carolina during the years from 2011 to 2016, including 71724 hospital admissions. We aim to provide a predictive model that can be helpful for related entities including hospitals, health insurance actuaries, and Medicare to reduce the cost and improve the clinical outcome of the healthcare system. We used R to process data and applied clustering, generalized linear model (GLM) and LASSO regressions to predict the 30-day readmissions. It turns out that the patient's age is the most important factor impacting hospital readmission. This research can help hospitals and CMS reduce costly readmissions.