Systematic review of approaches to use of neighborhood-level risk factors with clinical data to predict clinical risk and recommend interventions.

Background: Despite a large body of literature investigating how the environment influences health outcomes, most published work to date includes only a limited subset of the rich clinical and environmental data that is available and does not address how these data might best be used to predict clinical risk or expected impact of clinical interventions.

Objective: Identify existing approaches to inclusion of a broad set of neighborhood-level risk factors with clinical data to predict clinical risk and recommend interventions.

Methods: A systematic review of scientific literature published and indexed in PubMed, Web of Science, Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and SCOPUS from 2010 through October 2020 was performed. To be included, articles had to include search terms related to Electronic Health Record (EHR) data Neighborhood-Level Risk Factors (NLRFs), and Machine Learning (ML) Methods. Citations of relevant articles were also reviewed for additional articles for inclusion. Articles were reviewed and coded by two independent reviewers to capture key information including data sources, linkage of EHR to NRLFs, methods, and results. Articles were assessed for quality using a modified Quality Assessment Tool for Systematic Reviews of Observational Studies (QATSO).

Results: A total of 334 articles were identified for abstract review. 36 articles were identified for full review with 19 articles included in the final analysis. All but two of the articles included socio-demographic data derived from the U.S. Census and we found great variability in sources of NLRFs beyond the Census. The majority or the articles (14 of 19) included broader clinical (e.g. medications, labs and co-morbidities) and demographic information about the individual from the EHR in addition to the clinical outcome variable. Half of the articles (10) had a stated goal to predict the outcome(s) of interest. While results of the studies reinforced the correlative association of NLRFs to clinical outcomes, only one article found that adding NLRFs into a model with other data added predictive power with the remainder concluding either that NLRFs were of mixed value depending on the model and outcome or that NLRFs added no predictive power over other data in the model. Only one article scored high on the quality assessment with 13 scoring moderate and 4 scoring low.

Conclusions: In spite of growing interest in combining NLRFs with EHR data for clinical prediction, we found limited evidence that NLRFs improve predictive power in clinical risk models. We found these data and methods are being used in four ways. First, early approaches to include broad NLRFs to predict clinical risk primarily focused on dimension reduction for feature selection or as a data preparation step to input into regression analysis. Second, more recent work incorporates NLRFs into more advanced predictive models, such as Neural Networks, Random Forest, and Penalized Lasso to predict clinical outcomes or predict value of interventions. Third, studies that test how inclusion of NLRFs predict clinical risk have shown mixed results regarding the value of these data over EHR or claims data alone and this review surfaced evidence of potential quality challenges and biases inherent to this approach. Finally, NLRFs were used with unsupervised learning to identify underlying patterns in patient populations to recommend targeted interventions. Further access to computable, high quality data is needed along with careful study design, including sub-group analysis, to better determine how these data and methods can be used to support decision making in a clinical setting.