Accurately measuring the effectiveness of medical or pharmacological interv
entions is essential in economic evaluations. Many economic evaluations are
performed retrospectively using medical and pharmacy claims databases. A c
hallenge to using this approach is that variation in treatment patterns pre
vents simple comparisons between patient groups. Multiple logistic regressi
on is a powerful technique that can overcome this challenge and is suited f
or evaluating dichotomous outcomes (eg, disease/no disease). An example is
presented that applies multiple logistic regression to determine the impact
of different drug therapies on hospitalization risk for heart failure amon
g patient with congestive heart failure.