Predicting patients' hospital length of stay (LOS) is essential for improving resource allocation and supporting decision-making in healthcare organizations. This paper proposes a novel approach for predicting LOS by modeling patient information as sequences of events. Specifically, we present a transformer-based model, termed Medic-BERT (M-BERT), for LOS prediction using the unique features describing patients' medical event sequences. We performed empirical experiments on a cohort of more than 45k emergency care patients from a large Danish hospital. Experimental results show that M-BERT can achieve high accuracy on a variety of LOS problems and outperforms traditional nonsequence-based machine learning approaches.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.