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The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into in-hospital clinical decision systems has revolutionized patient care, yet challenges persist in ensuring explainability, managing risks, and establishing robust governance. This conceptual manuscript proposes the explainable risk governance orchestration framework (ERGOF), a novel model designed to orchestrate risk intelligence within clinical environments. ERGOF emphasizes layered architectures that integrate data interoperability, real-time risk assessment, explainable decision pipelines, and adaptive governance mechanisms to mitigate biases and enhance trustworthiness. Drawing from theoretical foundations in healthcare informatics and AI ethics, the framework addresses key gaps in current systems, such as opaque decision-making and fragmented oversight. Through interpretive formulas for risk propagation and governance load, ERGOF illustrates how explainable intelligence can be embedded in clinical workflows without empirical validation. The model promotes seamless integration with electronic health records (EHRs) and decision support tools, fostering human-AI collaboration in high-stakes settings like intensive care units. By prioritizing transparency and accountability, ERGOF offers a pathway for sustainable AI deployment in hospitals, potentially reducing clinical errors and improving outcomes. This work synthesizes recent literature to advocate for governance-centric designs, highlighting the need for interdisciplinary approaches in AI-driven healthcare. Ultimately, ERGOF serves as a blueprint for future systems that balance innovation with ethical imperatives in clinical decision-making.

Heart failure affects over 6 million Americans, with 30-day readmission rates remaining 20–25% despite longstanding quality improvement efforts. These readmissions cost about $17 billion annually and are penalized under federal reimbursement programs, yet existing prediction models have not achieved clinically useful performance. Most current models treat patients independently and fail to capture meaningful relationships among patients with similar medication patterns, admission histories, and social circumstances. They also often exclude critical social determinants of health (SDOH), such as housing instability and food insecurity, despite their strong association with readmission risk. In addition, black-box models lack interpretability, limiting clinician trust and usability. I argue that explainable graph neural networks (GNNs) integrating clinical data, SDOH, and prior admissions should replace traditional logistic regression and tree-based models for readmission prediction. Patient similarity graphs can represent clinically relevant relationships that tabular models miss, while graph attention mechanisms provide interpretable, actionable explanations. GNNs enable direct integration of SDOH and prior utilization patterns and offer transparency by highlighting which similar patients most influence predictions. This makes them more suitable for clinical decision support than existing approaches. Overall, persistent readmission rates reflect limitations in current modeling strategies. Explainable GNNs provide a more clinically meaningful and policy-relevant approach to improving prediction and reducing preventable readmissions.