Feature importance analysis for patient management decisions

2026-05-06

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to understand what characteristics and features of clinical data influence physician's decision about ordering laboratory tests or prescribing medications the most. We conduct our analysis on data and decisions extracted from electronic health records of 4486 post-surgical cardiac patients. The summary statistics for 335 different lab order decisions and 407 medication decisions are reported. We show that in many cases, physician's lab-order and medication decisions can be well predicted from a small subset of all features.

Problem

• feature importance
• clinical decision making
• electronic health records
• laboratory test ordering
• medication prescription

Innovation

• feature importance
• clinical decision-making
• electronic health records
• predictive modeling
• post-surgical care