Segmentation analysis and the recovery of queuing parameters via the Wasserstein distance: a study of administrative data for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

TL;DR

This study presents a data-driven method combining segmentation, queuing theory, and Wasserstein distance to analyze resource needs of COPD patients using administrative data, revealing that external health policies are most effective for system relief.

Contribution

It introduces a novel combination of segmentation, queuing models, and Wasserstein distance for parameter recovery from incomplete administrative data on COPD patients.

Findings

External policies improving patient health reduce hospital system strain.

Adding capacity alone does not significantly alleviate COPD-related resource demands.

The approach overcomes data limitations to provide operational insights.

Abstract

This work uses a data-driven approach to analyse how the resource requirements of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) may change, quantifying how those changes impact the hospital system with which the patients interact. This approach is composed of a novel combination of often distinct modes of analysis: segmentation, operational queuing theory, and the recovery of parameters from incomplete data. By combining these methods as presented here, this work demonstrates that potential limitations around the availability of fine-grained data can be overcome. Thus, finding useful operational results despite using only administrative data. The paper begins by finding a useful clustering of the population from this granular data that feeds into a multi-class M/M/c model, whose parameters are recovered from the data via parameterisation and the Wasserstein distance. This model is then used to conduct an informative analysis of the underlying queuing system and the needs of the population under study through several what-if scenarios. The analyses used to form and study this model consider, in effect, all types of patient arrivals and how those types impact the system. With that, this study finds that there are no quick solutions to reduce the impact of COPD patients on the system, including adding capacity to the system. In this analysis, the only effective intervention to reduce the strain caused by those presenting with COPD is to enact external policies which directly improve the overall health of the COPD population before they arrive at the hospital.