Clusters of medical specialties around patients with multimorbidity - employing fuzzy c-means clustering to explore multidisciplinary collaboration.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Hospital care organization, structured around medical specialties and focused on the separate treatment of individual organ systems, is challenged by the increasing prevalence of multimorbidity. To support the hospitals' realization of multidisciplinary care, we hypothesized that using machine learning on clinical data helps to identify groups of medical specialties who are simultaneously involved in hospital care for patients with multimorbidity.

Methods

We conducted a cross-sectional study of patients in a Dutch general hospital and used a fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm for the analysis. We explored the patients' membership degrees in each cluster to identify subgroups of medical specialties that provide care to the same patients with multimorbidity. We used

SUBMITTER: Verhoeff M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10492354 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature