Using an asthma control questionnaire and administrative data to predict health-care utilization.
OBJECTIVE
To examine the merits of the Asthma Therapy Assessment Questionnaire (ATAQ) control index together with prior asthma health-care utilization from administrative data in predicting future acute asthma health-care utilization.


METHODS
Prospective cohort study.


METHODS
A total of 4,788 adult asthma patients aged 17 to 93 years who completed a baseline evaluation and had at least 6 months of follow-up data.


METHODS
Classification and regression tree methodology to predict future risk of acute health-care utilization events.


RESULTS
These results show that the ATAQ control index and administrative data are jointly useful for predicting future health-care utilization. The utility of the ATAQ control index in the presence of information about prior health-care utilization is to further stratify risk among the subset of younger individuals who did not have any prior acute health-care utilization. While administrative health-care utilization data served as the strongest predictor of future health-care utilization, the ATAQ control index helped to identify 1% of individuals without recent acute care that had approximately a sixfold elevated risk (95% confidence interval, 4.2 to 8.4) of future acute health-care utilization. This is an important result since only a small fraction of individuals with acute events in a given year will have had acute events in the previous year.


CONCLUSIONS
These findings should assist the practicing clinician and organizations interested in population-based asthma disease management.
Peters
Dawn
D
Oregon Health and Science University, 3181 SW Sam Jackson Park Rd, Portland, OR 97239-3098, USA. petersd@ohsu.edu
Chen
Chuhe
C
Markson
Leona E
LE
Allen-Ramey
Felicia C
FC
Vollmer
William M
WM
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000465:Algorithms; D001249:Asthma / Q000517:prevention & control*; D005260:Female; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D006296:Health Services / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D011446:Prospective Studies; D012044:Regression Analysis; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires