The use of analytic hierarchy process for measuring the complexity of medical diagnosis
By: Ben-Assuli O., Kumar N., Arazy O., Shabtai I.
Published in: Health Informatics Journal
SDGs : SDG 03 | Units: Social Sciences | Time: 2020 | Link
Description: Diagnostic complexity is an important contextual factor affecting a variety of medical outcomes. Existing measurements o f 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). © The Author(s) 2019.