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

Understanding Dynamic Status Change of Hospital Stay and Cost Accumulation via Combining Continuous and Finitely Jumped Processes. Comput Math Methods Med. 2018;2018:6367243 Authors: Zheng Y, Zhao X, Zhang X 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 draw...
Source: Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine - Category: Statistics Tags: Comput Math Methods Med Source Type: research