Human Disease Clinical Treatment Network For The Elderly: The Analysis Of Medicare Inpatient Length Of Stay Data

Disease clinical treatment measures, such as inpatient length of stay (LOS), have been examined for most if not all diseases. Such analysis has important implications for the management and planning of health care, financial, and human resources. In addition, clinical treatment measures can also informatively reflect intrinsic disease properties such as severity. The existing studies mostly focus on either a single disease (or a few pre-selected and closely related diseases) or all diseases combined. In this study, we take a new and innovative perspective, examine the interconnections in length of stay (LOS) among diseases, and construct the very first disease clinical treatment network on LOS. To accommodate uniquely challenging data distributions, a new conditional network construction approach is developed. Based on the constructed network, the analysis of important network properties is conducted. The Medicare data on 100 000 randomly selected subjects for the period of January 2008 to December 2018 is analyzed. The network structure and key properties are found to have sensible biomedical interpretations. Being the very first of its kind, this study can be informative to disease clinical management, advance our understanding of disease interconnections, and foster complex network analysis.