JMIR Publications

Background:

Clinical guidelines recommend screening for depression in the general adult population but recognizes that the optimum interval for screening is unknown. Ideal screening intervals should match the patient risk profiles.

Objective:

This study describes a predictive analytics approach for mining clinical and patient-reported data from a large clinical study for the identification of primary care patients at high risk for depression to match depression screening intervals with patient risk profiles.

Methods:

This paper analyzed data from a large safety-net primary care study for diabetes and depression. A regression-based data mining technique was used to examine 53 demographics, clinical variables, and patient-reported variables to develop three prediction models for major depression at 6, 12, and 18 months from baseline. Predictors with the strongest predictive power that require low information collection efforts were selected to develop the prediction models. Predictive accuracy was measured by the area under the receiver operating curve (AUROC) and was evaluated by 10-fold cross-validation. The effectiveness of the prediction algorithms in supporting clinical decision making for six “typical” types of patients was demonstrated.

Results:

The analysis included 923 patients who were nondepressed at the study baseline. Five patient-reported variables were selected in the prediction models to predict major depression at 6, 12, and 18 months: (1) Patient Health Questionnaire 2-item score; (2) the Sheehan Disability Scale; (3) previous problems with depression; (4) the diabetes symptoms scale; and (5) emotional burden of diabetes. All three depression prediction models had an AUROC>0.80, comparable with published depression prediction studies. Among the 6 “typical” types of patients, the algorithms suggest that patients who reported impaired daily functioning by health status are at an elevated risk for depression in all three periods.

Conclusions:

This study demonstrated that leveraging patient-reported data and prediction models can help improve identification of high-risk patients and clinical decisions about the depression screening interval for diabetes patients. Implementation of this approach can be coupled with application of modern technologies such as telehealth and mobile health assessment for collecting patient-reported data to improve privacy, reducing stigma and costs, and promoting a personalized depression screening that matches screening intervals with patient risk profiles.