Title: Israeli Health Systems Background and a Research on Frequent Readmissions of Chronic Disease Patients including: Risk Stratification and Profiling

Abstract: We will start the presentation with a short description on the Israeli health systems and medical technologies. Then, the presentation will deal with at least one recent research paper on the topic of repeated readmissions. Predicting frequent, preventable readmissions and understanding the contributing features is a serious problem that is being widely studied. Very few studies have inspected longitudinal risk stratification, profiling and prediction of multi-morbid patient populations. We examine how readmission risk may progress over multiple emergency department visits of chronic disease patients, their early stratification into distinct trajectories, and the association of these trajectories to patient features. We further extend this analysis to investigate the impact of time-stable and time-varying covariates in predicting future readmission conditional on latent class membership using three methods: group-based trajectory models (GBTM) (Nagin 2005), covariate latent class models (CLCM) (Vermunt 2010) and hidden Markov model (HMM) (Netzer et al. 2008; Rabiner and Juang 1986). Results show that longitudinal risk stratification can allow early identification of patient groups following distinct trajectories. Prediction models that incorporate latent classes perform well and exhibit the potential of combining trajectory modeling methods with predictive analytics.

Short Bio: Ofir Ben-Assuli serves as the director of Information Systems Specialization (graduate level) and as Director of Information Systems Research Fields in the Faculty of Business Administration at the Ono Academic College. He completed his Ph.D. degree in Management Information Systems, Tel Aviv University in 2011; MBA (Specialization in Information Systems and Finance), The Hebrew University in 2005 and a B.A. in Economics and Computer Science, The Ben-Gurion University in 2002. His main research interests are in healthcare information technology, predictive analytics and medical informatics. He has published in European Journal of Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, International Journal of Medical Informatics, Decision Sciences, Decision Support Systems, Health Policy, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, Health Informatics Journal, among others. Ofir has been awarded several grants for his research including from the U.S.–Israel BSF and the German–Israeli Foundation GIF.