Detection of Anomalous Patterns Associated with the Impact of Medications on 30-Day Hospital Readmission Rates in Diabetes Care

Improving quality of care in diabetes requires a good understanding of variations in diabetes outcomes and related interventions. However, little is known about the impact of diabetes interventions on outcome measures at the subpopulation-level. In this study, we developed methods that combine causal inference techniques with subset scanning techniques to study the heterogeneous effects of treatments on binary health outcomes. We analyzed a diabetes dataset consisting of 70,000 initial inpatient encounters to investigate the anomalous patterns associated with the impact of 4 anti-diabetic medication classes on 30-day readmission in diabetes. We discovered anomalous subpopulations where the likelihood of readmission was up to 1.8 times higher than that of the overall population suggesting subpopulation-level heterogeneity. Identifying such subpopulations may lead to a better understanding of the heterogeneous effects of treatments and improve targeted intervention planning.