Identifying low acuity Emergency Department visits with a machine learning approach: The low acuity visit algorithms (LAVA).

Objective: To improve the performance of International Classification of Disease (ICD) code rule-based algorithms for identifying low acuity Emergency Department (ED) visits by using machine learning methods and additional covariates.

Data Sources: We used secondary data on ED visits from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Survey (NHAMCS), from 2016 to 2020.

Study Design: We established baseline performance metrics with seven published algorithms consisting of International Classification of Disease, Tenth Revision codes used to identify low acuity ED visits.