Using Machine Learning to Efficiently Vaccinate Homebound Patients Against COVID-19: A Real-time Immunization Campaign

• Published in: Journal of medical Internet research Vol. 24; no. 7; p. e37744
• Main Authors: Kumar, Anish, Ren, Jennifer, Ornstein, Katherine A, Gliatto, Peter M
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Canada Gunther Eysenbach MD MPH, Associate Professor 12.07.2022; JMIR Publications
• Subjects: African Americans; Algorithms; Application programming interface; Averages; Campaigns; Caregivers; Clustering; Comorbidity; Coronaviruses; COVID-19; COVID-19 - prevention & control; COVID-19 vaccines; Drug dosages; Ethics; Ethnic identity; Housebound people; Humans; Immunization; Machine Learning; Medical schools; Patients; Physicians; Public health; Racial identity; Relatives; Research Letter; Research subjects; Scheduling; Software; Vaccination; New York; United States > US; covid; clustering algorithm; patient data; digital surveillance; machine learning; geographic cluster; COVID-19; vaccine; home care; geospatial; electronic health record integration; public health; logistic operation; vaccination
• ISSN: 1438-8871; 1439-4456; 1438-8871
• DOI: 10.2196/37744

Methods Ethics Approval The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai’s Program for the Protection of Human Subjects approved and granted a waiver of consent for this secondary data analysis study (STUDY- 21-00157) which was conducted in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration. Using the Google Maps Geocoding application programming interface (API), we obtained latitude/longitude coordinates of patient residences, which served as the input data to our algorithm. Value Patient demographics Patients who are homebound 428 Average age (years) 83.9 Average Elixhauser comorbidity score [6]a 3.8 Sex, n (%) Female 323 (75.5) Male 105 (24.5) Racial/ethnic identity, n (%) White 148 (34.6) Black or African American 63 (14.7) Asian 15 (3.5) Hispanic 108 (25.2) Other 86 (20.1) Unknown 8 (1.9) Patient’s family members and caregivers, n 92 Vaccination campaign statistics Providers vaccinating per day (n), range 3-6 Average number of patients vaccinated per day 22.1 Average duration of provider time spent vaccinating (hours) 4.6 Average duration of individual vaccination (including transit time, vaccine administration, and 15-minute postvaccination observation time; minutes) 52 aElixhauser scores were available for 372 of the patients who are homebound.