Importance: Prediction models are widely used in health care as a way of risk stratifying populations for targeted intervention. Most risk stratification has been done using a small number of predictors from insurance claims. However, the utility of diverse nonclinical predictors, such as neighborhood socioeconomic contexts, remains unknown.
Objective: To assess the value of using neighborhood socioeconomic predictors in the context of 1-year risk prediction for mortality and 6 different health care use outcomes in a large integrated care system.
Design, setting, and participants: Diagnostic study using data from all adults age 18 years or older who had Kaiser Foundation Health Plan membership and/or use in the Kaiser Permantente Northern California: a multisite, integrated health care delivery system between January 1, 2013, and June 30, 2014. Data were recorded before the index date for each patient to predict their use and mortality in a 1-year post period using a test-train split for model training and evaluation. Analyses were conducted in fall of 2019.
Main outcomes and measures: One-year encounter counts (doctor office, virtual, emergency department, elective hospitalizations, and nonelective), total costs, and mortality.
Results: A total of 2 951 588 patients met inclusion criteria (mean [SD] age, 47.2 [17.4] years; 47.8% were female). The mean (SD) Neighborhood Deprivation Index was -0.32 (0.84). The areas under the receiver operator curve ranged from 0.71 for emergency department use (using the LASSO method and electronic health record predictors) to 0.94 for mortality (using the random forest method and electronic health record predictors). Neighborhood socioeconomic status predictors did not meaningfully increase the predictive performance of the models for any outcome.
Conclusions and relevance: In this study, neighborhood socioeconomic predictors did not improve risk estimates compared with what is obtainable using standard claims data regardless of model used.