Building Classifiers to Predict the Start of Glucose-Lowering Pharmacotherapy Using Belgian Health Expenditure Data

Understand

Early diagnosis is important for type 2 diabetes (T2D) to improve patient prognosis, prevent complications and reduce long-term treatment costs.

• We present a novel risk profiling approach based exclusively on health expenditure data that is available to Belgian mutual health insurers.
• We used expenditure data related to drug purchases and medical provisions to construct models that predict whether a patient will start glucose-lowering pharmacotherapy in the coming years, based on that patient's recent medical expenditure history.
• The design and implementation of the modeling strategy are discussed in detail and several learning methods are benchmarked for our application.