Human disease clinical treatment network for the elderly: analysis of the medicare inpatient length of stay and readmission data

Clinical treatment outcomes are the quality and cost targets that health‐care providers aim to improve. Most existing outcome analysis focuses on a single disease or all diseases combined. Motivated by the success of molecular and phenotypic human disease networks (HDNs), this article develops a clinical treatment network that describes the interconnections among diseases in terms of inpatient length of stay (LOS) and readmission. Here one node represents one disease, and two nodes are linked with an edge if their LOS and number of readmissions are conditionally dependent. This is the very first HDN that jointly analyzes multiple clinical treatment outcomes at the pan‐disease level. To accommodate the unique data characteristics, we propose a modeling approach based on two‐part generalized linear models and estimation based on penalized integrative analysis. Analysis is conducted on the Medicare inpatient data of 100,000 randomly selected subjects for the period of January 2010 to December 2018. The resulted network has 1008 edges for 106 nodes. We analyze key network properties including connectivity, module/hub, and temporal variation. The findings are biomedically sensible. For example, high connectivity and hub conditions, such as disorders of lipid metabolism and essential hypertension, are identified. There are also findings that are less/not investigated in the literature. Overall, this study can provide additional insight into diseases' properties and their interconnections and assist more efficient disease management and health‐care resources allocation.