Development and Validation of a Diabetes Mellitus Severity Index: A Risk‐Adjustment Tool for Predicting Health Care Resource Use and Costs

Abstract

The DSI was developed to stratify veterans with diabetes according to diabetes severity and comorbidity. Since additional variance in medical care costs were explained by combining the DSI and CDS, the two indexes may explain different dimensions of a patient's severity of diabetes. However, the utility of such an index based on clinical measures to predict short-term use may be limited due to low yet significant variability explained in the outcomes.