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arXiv · 2412.12909

PT: A Plain Transformer is Good Hospital Readmission Predictor

Zhenyi Fan·Jiaqi Li·Dongyu Luo·Yuqi Yuan
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Abstract

Hospital readmission prediction is critical for clinical decision support, aiming to identify patients at risk of returning within 30 days post-discharge. High readmission rates often indicate inadequate treatment or post-discharge care, making effective prediction models essential for optimizing resources and improving patient outcomes. We propose PT, a Transformer-based model that integrates Electronic Health Records (EHR), medical images, and clinical notes to predict 30-day all-cause hospital readmissions. PT extracts features from raw data and uses specialized Transformer blocks tailored to the data's complexity. Enhanced with Random Forest for EHR feature selection and test-time ensemble techniques, PT achieves superior accuracy, scalability, and robustness. It performs well even when temporal information is missing. Our main contributions are: (1)Simplicity: A powerful and efficient baseline model outperforming existing ones in prediction accuracy; (2)Scalability: Flexible handling of various features from different modalities, achieving high performance with just clinical notes or EHR data; (3)Robustness: Strong predictive performance even with missing or unclear temporal data.

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Zhenyi Fan, Jiaqi Li, Dongyu Luo, Yuqi Yuan. 2024-12-17. PT: A Plain Transformer is Good Hospital Readmission Predictor. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.12909

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