Understanding Dynamic Status Change of Hospital Stay and Cost Accumulation via Combining Continuous and Finitely Jumped Processes

Comput Math Methods Med. 2018 Jun 10:2018:6367243. doi: 10.1155/2018/6367243. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

The Coxian phase-type models and the joint models of longitudinal and event time have been extensively used in the studies of medical outcome data. Coxian phase-type models have the finite-jump property while the joint models usually assume a continuous variation. The gap between continuity and discreteness makes the two models rarely used together. In this paper, a partition-based approach is proposed to jointly model the charge accumulation process and the time to discharge. The key construction of our new approach is a set of partition cells with their boundaries determined by a family of differential equations. Using the cells, our new approach makes it possible to incorporate finite jumps induced by a Coxian phase-type model into the charge accumulation process, therefore taking advantage of both the Coxian phase-type models and joint models. As a benefit, a couple of measures of the "cost" of staying in each medical stage (identified with phases of a Coxian phase-type model) are derived, which cannot be approached without considering the joint models and the Coxian phase-type models together. A two-step procedure is provided to generate consistent estimation of model parameters, which is applied to a subsample drawn from a well-known medical cost database.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Hospital Costs*
  • Humans
  • Length of Stay / economics*
  • Models, Theoretical