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Polypharmacy, defined as the concurrent use of five or more medications, is highly prevalent among older adults and patients with multiple chronic conditions and is associated with an increased risk of drug–drug interactions (DDIs), leading to adverse drug events, hospitalizations, and higher healthcare costs. Existing DDI databases are often incomplete and fail to capture higher-order interactions, while many machine learning approaches overlook temporal prescription patterns and molecular structure information, limiting their effectiveness in real-world clinical settings. To address these limitations, this study proposes a graph neural network (GNN)-based framework that integrates prescription sequence data with molecular representations to improve DDI prediction. The model constructs a unified graph where drug nodes encode both known interactions and learned similarities, while a prescription sequence encoder captures temporal co-prescribing patterns and a molecular encoder processes SMILES-based structures. These multimodal representations are fused within a patient–drug interaction graph and refined using GNN layers with attention mechanisms to enhance interpretability. By combining longitudinal clinical data with chemical structure information, the framework enables more accurate, context-aware, and patient-specific prediction of DDIs, supports the identification of novel interactions, and improves risk stratification in polypharmacy settings, offering a scalable and interpretable foundation for future clinical decision support systems.

Seasonal influenza and respiratory viruses cause recurring surges in hospital bed demand, often resulting in overcrowding under reactive capacity management. ILI surveillance data and environmental factors such as temperature and humidity provide early signals of transmission, making them valuable for forecasting healthcare demand. Traditional forecasting methods rely on simple time series models or historical averages and fail to capture spatial disease spread or environmental influences, leading to inaccurate predictions and poor resource allocation. We propose a spatiotemporal graph neural network (ST-GNN) that integrates ILI surveillance and environmental data for regional daily hospital bed demand forecasting. The model represents regions as graph nodes connected by population flow, enabling joint spatial-temporal modeling of disease dynamics. The framework uses regional graph construction, ILI data from healthcare visits, and environmental variables such as temperature, humidity, and air quality. These inputs are processed by the ST-GNN to predict daily bed demand. The approach captures spatial disease propagation and improves early detection of demand surges, supporting proactive healthcare planning. The ST-GNN provides a scalable, data-driven framework for improving hospital bed demand forecasting and enhancing preparedness during seasonal epidemics.

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.

Chronic postsurgical pain (CPSP) affects 10–50% of surgical patients and is a major contributor to long-term opioid use and reduced quality of life. Current predictive models treat patients independently and fail to capture how risk evolves over time or how postoperative opioid trajectories influence divergence in outcomes. We propose a dynamic graph neural network (GNN) framework in which patients are modeled as nodes and similarity-based edges evolve over time based on opioid prescription patterns, pain scores, and preoperative psychological factors. The model includes (1) a patient graph with static preoperative features, (2) a temporal edge update mechanism, (3) a GNN message-passing layer that aggregates information from dynamically connected patients, and (4) a prediction head estimating CPSP risk at 3, 6, and 12 months. By modeling changing patient relationships after surgery, the framework captures how similar patients may diverge or converge depending on postoperative management, enabling more accurate and personalized CPSP risk prediction using longitudinal electronic health record data.

Pressure ulcers are a persistent issue in bedridden patients, especially in intensive care, rehabilitation, and long-term care, leading to pain, infection, and extended hospital stays. Current risk assessments rely on intermittent scoring and clinical judgment, failing to account for continuous changes in body posture, tissue loading, and mechanical tolerance. This conceptual framework proposes a physics-informed graph neural network to predict pressure ulcer risk by integrating data from body position sensors, local tissue loading, and skin perfusion measurements into a dynamic, personalized model. The model represents the body as a graph, with nodes representing pressure-prone areas and edges indicating anatomical and mechanical connections. Tissue stress, perfusion data, and posture features are processed through network layers constrained by soft-tissue mechanics. By encoding the relationship between external forces, internal tissue deformation, ischemia, and damage, the framework allows risk propagation across adjacent anatomical regions. This approach offers a path for continuous, personalized pressure ulcer risk monitoring, laying the foundation for clinical validation and sensor integration.