  Mitigating risk-of-readmission of Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) patients
within 30 days of discharge is important because such readmissions are not only
expensive but also critical indicator of provider care and quality of
treatment. Accurately predicting the risk-of-readmission may allow hospitals to
identify high-risk patients and eventually improve quality of care by
identifying factors that contribute to such readmissions in many scenarios. In
this paper, we investigate the problem of predicting risk-of-readmission as a
supervised learning problem, using a multi-layer classification approach.
Earlier contributions inadequately attempted to assess a risk value for 30 day
readmission by building a direct predictive model as opposed to our approach.
We first split the problem into various stages, (a) at risk in general (b) risk
within 60 days (c) risk within 30 days, and then build suitable classifiers for
each stage, thereby increasing the ability to accurately predict the risk using
multiple layers of decision. The advantage of our approach is that we can use
different classification models for the subtasks that are more suited for the
respective problems. Moreover, each of the subtasks can be solved using
different features and training data leading to a highly confident diagnosis or
risk compared to a one-shot single layer approach. An experimental evaluation
on actual hospital patient record data from Multicare Health Systems shows that
our model is significantly better at predicting risk-of-readmission of CHF
patients within 30 days after discharge compared to prior attempts.
