TY - JOUR
PY - 2023//
TI - Predictive care: a protocol for a computational ethnographic approach to building fair models of inpatient violence in emergency psychiatry
JO - BMJ open
A1 - Sikstrom, Laura
A1 - Maslej, Marta M.
A1 - Findlay, Zoe
A1 - Strudwick, Gillian
A1 - Hui, Katrina
A1 - Zaheer, Juveria
A1 - Hill, Sean L.
A1 - Buchman, Daniel Z.
SP - e069255
EP - e069255
VL - 13
IS - 4
N2 - INTRODUCTION: Managing violence or aggression is an ongoing challenge in emergency psychiatry. Many patients identified as being at risk do not go on to become violent or aggressive. Efforts to automate the assessment of risk involve training machine learning (ML) models on data from electronic health records (EHRs) to predict these behaviours. However, no studies to date have examined which patient groups may be over-represented in false positive predictions, despite evidence of social and clinical biases that may lead to higher perceptions of risk in patients defined by intersecting features (eg, race, gender). Because risk assessment can impact psychiatric care (eg, via coercive measures, such as restraints), it is unclear which patients might be underserved or harmed by the application of ML.
METHODS AND ANALYSIS: We pilot a computational ethnography to study how the integration of ML into risk assessment might impact acute psychiatric care, with a focus on how EHR data is compiled and used to predict a risk of violence or aggression. Our objectives include: (1) evaluating an ML model trained on psychiatric EHRs to predict violent or aggressive incidents for intersectional bias; and (2) completing participant observation and qualitative interviews in an emergency psychiatric setting to explore how social, clinical and structural biases are encoded in the training data. Our overall aim is to study the impact of ML applications in acute psychiatry on marginalised and underserved patient groups. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: The project was approved by the research ethics board at The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (053/2021). Study findings will be presented in peer-reviewed journals, conferences and shared with service users and providers.
Language: en
LA - en SN - 2044-6055 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2022-069255 ID - ref1 ER -