Predicting Falls in People Aged 65 Years and Older from Insurance Claims

Abstract

Background: Accidental falls among people aged 65 years and older caused approximately 2,700,000 injuries, 27,000 deaths, and cost more than 34 billion dollars in the US annually in recent years. Here, we derive and validate a predictive model for falls based on a retrospective cohort of those 65 years and older.

Methods: Insurance claims from a 1-year observational period were used to predict a fall-related claim in the following 2 years. The predictive model takes into account a person's age, sex, prescriptions, and diagnoses. Through random assignment, half of the people had their claims used to derive the model, while the remaining people had their claims used to validate the model.

Results: Of 120,881 individuals with Aetna health insurance coverage, 12,431 (10.3%) members fell. During validation, people were risk stratified across 20 levels, where those in the highest risk stratum had 10.5 times the risk as those in the lowest stratum (33.1% vs 3.1%).

Conclusions: Using only insurance claims, individuals in this large cohort at high risk of falls could be readily identified up to 2 years in advance. Although external validation is needed, the findings support the use of the model to better target interventions.

Keywords: Falls; Population health; Risk assessment.