Personalized Multimorbidity Management for Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Using Reinforcement Learning of Electronic Health Records.

BACKGROUND

Comorbid chronic conditions are common among people with type 2 diabetes. We developed an artificial intelligence algorithm, based on reinforcement learning (RL), for personalized diabetes and multimorbidity management, with strong potential to improve health outcomes relative to current clinical practice.

METHODS

We modeled glycemia, blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk as health outcomes, using a retrospective cohort of 16,665 patients with type 2 diabetes from New York University Langone Health ambulatory care electronic health records in 2009-2017. We trained an RL prescription algorithm that recommends a treatment regimen optimizing patients' cumulative health outcomes using their individual characteristics and medical history at each encounter. The RL recommendations were evaluated on an independent subset of patients.

RESULTS

The single-outcome optimization RL algorithms, RL-glycemia, RL-blood pressure, and RL-CVD, recommended consistent prescriptions as that observed by clinicians in 86.1%, 82.9%, and 98.4% of the encounters, respectively. For patient encounters in which the RL recommendations differed from the clinician prescriptions, significantly fewer encounters showed uncontrolled glycemia (A1c > 8% in 35% of encounters), uncontrolled hypertension (blood pressure > 140 mmHg in 16% of encounters), and high CVD risk (risk > 20% in 25% of encounters) under RL algorithms compared with those observed under clinicians (43%, 27%, and 31% of encounters, respectively; all p < 0.001).

CONCLUSIONS

A personalized RL prescriptive framework for type 2 diabetes yielded high concordance with clinicians' prescriptions, and substantial improvements in glycemia, blood pressure, and CVD risk outcomes.