Using Electronic Health Records and Machine Learning to Predict Postpartum Depression

Abstract

Postpartum depression (PPD) is one of the most frequent maternal morbidities after delivery with serious implications. Currently, there is a lack of effective screening strategies and high-quality clinical trials. The ability to leverage a large amount of detailed patient data from electronic health records (EHRs) to predict PPD could enable the implementation of effective clinical decision support interventions. To develop a PPD prediction model, using EHRs from Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital between 2015-17, 9,980 episodes of pregnancy were identified. Six machine learning algorithms, including L2-regularized Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree, Naïve Bayes, XGBoost, and Random forest were constructed. Our model's best prediction performance achieved an AUC of 0.79. Race, obesity, anxiety, depression, different types of pain, antidepressants, and anti-inflammatory drugs during pregnancy were among the significant predictors. Our results suggest a potential for applying machine learning to EHR data to predict PPD and inform healthcare delivery.