TIQS: Targeted Iterative Question Selection for Health Interventions

Abstract

While healthcare has traditionally existed within the confines of formal clinical environments, the emergence of population health initiatives has given rise to a new and diverse set of community interventions. As the number of interventions continues to grow, the ability to quickly and accurately identify those most relevant to an individual’s specific need has become essential in the care process. However, due to the diverse nature of the interventions, the determination need often requires non-clinical social and behavioral information that must be collected from the individuals themselves. Although survey tools have demonstrated success in the collection of this data, time restrictions and diminishing respondent interest have presented barriers to obtaining up-to-date information on a regular basis. In response, researchers have turned to analytical approaches to optimize surveys and quantify the importance of each question. To date, the majority of these works have approached the task from a univariate standpoint, identifying the next most important question to ask. However, such an approach fails to address the interconnected nature of the health conditions inherently captured by the broader set of survey questions. Utilizing data mining and machine learning methodology, this work demonstrates the value of capturing these relations. We present a novel framework that identifies a variable-length subset of survey questions most relevant in determining the need for a particular health intervention for a given individual. We evaluate the framework using a large national longitudinal dataset centered on aging, demonstrating the ability to identify the questions with the highest impact across a variety of interventions.