Forecasting patients admitted to emergency departments with the
diagnosis of upper respiratory tract infection using time series and
artificial neural network modelling
Abstract
Emergency departments are vital units that work full-time, serve
critically ill patients and provide immediate emergency care according
to the triage code of the admitted patients. The efficient operation of
emergency services depends on adequate human and medical resources and
early planning efforts. The increase in the intensity of emergency
services due to covid-19, which is a biological disaster, has limited
the effective use of resources and planning studies. The patient density
in the emergency services can endanger the lives of the patients and
disrupt the service if no preparation is made. For this reason, it is
important to organize emergency service units according to patient
estimates, to reduce the density, to provide the service at an optimum
level, to provide ease of planning and management, to use medical and
human resources effectively, and to patient satisfaction. This study was
conducted to predict patient arrivals in the emergency department in the
context of meteorological data. This study, hourly forecasting results
are obtained using estimation methods seasonal autoregressive integrated
moving average (SARIMAX), artificial neural network (ANN), nonlinear
autoregressive models with exogenous inputs with exogenous
regressionists (NARX). For the study, patient arrival data from a
training and research hospital for December 2021 and meteorological data
such as temperature, humidity, and wind were used. The performance of
the estimation plot using multiple methods was measured by the mean
absolute percent error (MAPE). The SARIMAX model showed a better
performance than other methods in terms of prediction accuracy with a
MAPE value of 31%.