Low Screening Rates for Diabetes Mellitus Among Family Members of Affected Relatives

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, and abnormal blood glucose is an important risk factor. Delayed diagnosis of diabetes mellitus can increase patients’ morbidity. In an urban academic medical center with a large clinical data warehouse, we used a novel algorithm to identify 56,794 family members of diabetic patients that were eligible for disease screening. We found that 30.6% of patients did not receive diabetes screening as recommended by current guidelines. Further, our analysis showed that having more than one family member affected and being a female were important contributors to being screened for diabetes mellitus. This study demonstrates that informatics methods applied to electronic health record data can be used to identify patients at risk for disease development, and therefore support clinical care