Background:
Mortality prediction models, developed with the goal of improving risk stratification in hospitalized heart failure (HF) patients, show good performance characteristics in the datasets in which they were developed but have not been validated in external populations.
Methods:
We used a novel multi-hospital dataset [HealthFacts (Cerner Corp)] derived from the electronic health record (years 2010-2012). We examined the performance of four published HF inpatient mortality prediction models developed using data from: the Acute Decompensated Heart Failure National Registry (ADHERE), the Enhanced Feedback for Effective Cardiac Treatment (EFFECT) study, and the Get With the Guidelines-Heart Failure (GWTG-HF) registry. We compared to an administrative HF mortality prediction model (Premier model) that includes selected patient demographics, comorbidities, prior heart failure admissions, and therapies administered (e.g., inotropes, mechanical ventilation) in the first 2 hospital days. We also compared to a model that uses clinical data but is not heart failure-specific: the Laboratory-Based Acute Physiology Score (LAPS2). We included patients aged ≥18 years admitted with HF to one of 62 hospitals in the database. We applied all 6 models to the data and calculated the c-statistics.
Results:
We identified 13,163 patients ≥18 years old with a diagnosis of heart failure. Median age was 74 years; approximately half were women; 65% of patients were white and 27% were black. In-hospital mortality was 4.3%. Bland-Altman plots revealed that, at higher predicted mortality, the Premier model outperformed the clinical models. Discrimination of the models varied: ADHERE model (0.68); EFFECT (0.70); GWTG-HF, Peterson (0.69); GWTG-HF, Eapen (0.70); LAPS2 (0.74); Premier (0.81) (Figure).
Conclusions:
Clinically-derived inpatient heart failure mortality models exhibited similar performance with c statistics hovering around 0.70. A generic clinical mortality prediction model (LAPS2) had slightly better performance, as did a detailed administrative model. Any of these models may be useful for severity adjustment in comparative effectiveness studies of heart failure patients. When clinical data are not available, the administrative model performs similarly to clinical models.
Validation of U.S. mortality prediction models for hospitalized heart failure in the United Kingdom and Japan
