Hospital acquired pressure injury prediction in surgical critical care patients

Background: Hospital-acquired pressure injuries (HAPrIs) are areas of damage to the skin occurring among 5-10% of surgical intensive care unit (ICU) patients. HAPrIs are mostly preventable; however, prevention may require measures not feasible for every patient because of the cost or intensity of nursing care. Therefore, recommended standards of practice include HAPrI risk assessment at routine intervals. However, no HAPrI risk-prediction tools demonstrate adequate predictive validity in the ICU population. The purpose of the current study was to develop and compare models predicting HAPrIs among surgical ICU patients using electronic health record (EHR) data. Methods: In this retrospective cohort study, we obtained data for patients admitted to the surgical ICU or cardiovascular surgical ICU between 2014 and 2018 via query of our institution's EHR. We developed predictive models utilizing three sets of variables: (1) variables obtained during routine care + the Braden Scale (a pressure-injury risk-assessment scale); (2) routine care only; and (3) a parsimonious set of five routine-care variables chosen based on availability from an EHR and data warehouse perspective. Aiming to select the best model for predicting HAPrIs, we split each data set into standard 80:20 train:test sets and applied five classification algorithms. We performed this process on each of the three data sets, evaluating model performance based on continuous performance on the receiver operating characteristic curve and the F-1 score. Results: Among 5,101 patients included in analysis, 333 (6.5%) developed a HAPrI. F-1 scores of the five classification algorithms proved to be a valuable evaluation metric for model performance considering the class imbalance. Models developed with the parsimonious data set had comparable F-1 scores to those developed with the larger set of predictor variables. Conclusions: Results from this study show the feasibility of using EHR data for accurately predicting HAPrIs and that good performance can be found with a small group of easily accessible predictor variables. Future study is needed to test the models in an external sample.

Automated summary

This study aimed to develop and compare predictive models for HAPrIs among surgical ICU patients using EHR data. Results showed the feasibility and effectiveness of using easily accessible predictor variables for accurate prediction of HAPrIs, providing potential for future research validation.