Predict or draw blood: An integrated method to reduce lab tests

Serial laboratory testing is common, especially in Intensive Care Units (ICU). Such repeated testing is expensive and may even harm patients. However, identifying specific tests that can be omitted is challenging. The search space of different lab tests is large and the optimal reduction is hard to determine without modeling the time trajectory of decisions, which is a nontrivial optimization problem. In this paper, we propose a novel deep-learning method with a very concise architecture to jointly predict future lab test events to be omitted and the values of the omitted events based on observed testing values. Using our method, we were able to omit 15% of lab tests with <5% prediction accuracy loss. Although the application is specific to repeated lab tests, our proposed framework is highly generalizable and can be used to tackle a family of similar business decision making problems.