A paper authored by Zhaozhi Qian, Ahmed Alaa, and Mihaela van der Schaar has been accepted for publication in Machine Learning (editor-in-chief: Hendrik Blockeel).
The paper, entitled “CPAS: the UK’s National Machine Learning-based Hospital Capacity Planning System for COVID-19,” was accepted for publication on September 24.
The authors introduce a capacity planning and analysis system (CPAS) developed to enable clinicians to predict utilization of scarce resources, such as ventilators and ICU beds, during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The system is the result of a partnership (announced in April) between the van der Schaar Lab, NHS Digital, and Public Health England, and was built around Cambridge Adjutorium, a prediction system created by the van der Schaar Lab.
CPAS is one of the first machine learning-based systems to be deployed in hospitals on a national scale to address the COVID-19 pandemic.
CPAS: the UK’s National Machine Learning-based Hospital Capacity Planning System for COVID-19
Zhaozhi Qian, Ahmed Alaa, Mihaela van der Schaar
Abstract
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global pandemic poses the threat of overwhelming healthcare systems with unprecedented demands for intensive care resources. Managing these demands cannot be effectively conducted without a nationwide collective effort that relies on data to forecast hospital demands on the national, regional, hospital and individual levels.
To this end, we developed the COVID-19 Capacity Planning and Analysis System (CPAS) — a machine learning-based system for hospital resource planning that we have successfully deployed at individual hospitals and across regions in the UK in coordination with NHS Digital.
In this paper, we discuss the main challenges of deploying a machine learning-based decision support system at national scale, and explain how CPAS addresses these challenges by (1) defining the appropriate learning problem, (2) combining bottom-up and top-down analytical approaches, (3) using state-of-theart machine learning algorithms, (4) integrating heterogeneous data sources, and (5) presenting the result with an interactive and transparent interface.
CPAS is one of the first machine learning-based systems to be deployed in hospitals on a national scale to address the COVID-19 pandemic — we conclude the paper with a summary of the lessons learned from this experience.
For a full list of the van der Schaar Lab’s publications, click here.
To find out more about the van der Schaar Lab’s work related to the COVID-19 pandemic, visit our dedicated page here.