Database system to identify biological risk in managed care organizations: implications for clinical care

The investigators constructed an index measure of cardiovascular risk and scored 1.991 adults as having high, average, or low cardiovascular risk. High cardiovascular risk was positively associated with hospital admissions (odds ratio [OR] = 3.9, p < 0.0001), total hospital days (OR = 4.0, p < 0.001), primary care clinic visits (OR = 7.3, p < 0.0001), and subspecialty clinic visits (OR = 2.3, p = 0.0003), compared to low cardiovascular risk, after controlling in multivariate analyses for gender and age. The index can provide estimates of utilization, costs, and potential preventability of adverse cardiovascular events, can be used to identify groups of patients in need of various systematic interventions, and can provide population-based ways to evaluate the results of interventions.