We develop and evaluate a data-driven approach for detecting unusual (anomalous) patient-management decisions using past patient cases stored in electronic health records (EHRs). Our hypothesis is that a patient-management decision that is unusual with respect to past patient care may be due to an error and that it is worthwhile to generate an alert if such a decision is encountered. We evaluate this hypothesis using data obtained from EHRs of 4486 post-cardiac surgical patients and a subset of 222 alerts generated from the data. We base the evaluation on the opinions of a panel of experts. The results of the study support our hypothesis that the outlier-based alerting can lead to promising true alert rates. We observed true alert rates that ranged from 25\% to 66\% for a variety of patient-management actions, with 66\% corresponding to the strongest outliers.
@article{arxiv.2605.08955,
title = {Outlier detection for patient monitoring and alerting},
author = {Miloš Hauskrecht and Iyad Batal and Michal Valko and Shyam Visweswaran and Gregory F. Cooper and Gilles Clermont},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.08955},
year = {2026}
}