Publication Date
6-1-2022
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Healthcare (Switzerland)
Volume
10
Issue
6
DOI
10.3390/healthcare10061120
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the existing concern about the uncertainty surrounding patient arrival and the overutilization of resources in emergency departments (EDs). The prediction of variations in patient arrivals is vital for managing limited healthcare resources and facilitating data-driven resource planning. The objective of this study was to forecast ED patient arrivals during a pandemic over different time horizons. A secondary objective was to compare the performance of different forecasting models in predicting ED patient arrivals. We included all ED patient encounters at an urban teaching hospital between January 2019 and December 2020. We divided the data into training and testing datasets and applied univariate and multivariable forecasting models to predict daily ED visits. The influence of COVID-19 lockdown and climatic factors were included in the multivariable models. The model evaluation consisted of the root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) over different forecasting horizons. Our exploratory analysis illustrated that monthly and weekly patterns impact daily demand for care. The Holt–Winters approach outperformed all other univariate and multivariable forecasting models for short-term predictions, while the Long Short-Term Memory approach performed best in extended predictions. The developed forecasting models are able to accurately predict ED patient arrivals and peaks during a surge when tested on two years of data from a high-volume urban ED. These short-and long-term prediction models can potentially enhance ED and hospital resource planning.
Funding Number
002934
Funding Sponsor
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan Foundation
Keywords
COVID-19, deep learning, emergency department, emerging infectious disease, forecasting
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Department
Marketing and Business Analytics
Recommended Citation
Egbe Etu Etu, Leslie Monplaisir, Sara Masoud, Suzan Arslanturk, Joshua Emakhu, Imokhai Tenebe, Joseph B. Miller, Tom Hagerman, Daniel Jourdan, and Seth Krupp. "A Comparison of Univariate and Multivariate Forecasting Models Predicting Emergency Department Patient Arrivals during the COVID-19 Pandemic" Healthcare (Switzerland) (2022). https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare10061120
