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Risk patterns are crucial in biomedical research and have served as an important factor in precision health and disease prevention. Despite recent development in parallel and high-performance computing, existing risk pattern mining methods still struggle with problems caused by large-scale datasets, such as redundant candidate generation, inability to discover long significant patterns, and prolonged post pattern filtering. In this article, we propose a novel dynamic tree structure, Risk Hierarchical Pattern Tree (RHPTree), and a top-down search method, RHPSearch, which are capable of efficiently analyzing a large volume of data and overcoming the limitations of previous works. The dynamic nature of the RHPTree avoids costly tree reconstruction for the iterative search process and dataset updates. We also introduce two specialized search methods, the extended target search (RHPSearch-TS) and the parallel search approach (RHPSearch-SD), to further speed up the retrieval of certain items of interest. Experiments on both UCI machine learning datasets and sampled datasets of the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI)—Simon’s Simplex Collection (SSC) datasets demonstrate that our method is not only faster but also more effective in identifying comprehensive long risk patterns than existing works. Moreover, the proposed new tree structure is generic and applicable to other pattern mining problems. 

Objective: To identify differences in short-term outcomes of patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) according to various racial/ethnic groups.Design: Analysis of Cerner de-identified COVID-19 dataset.Setting: A total of 62 health care facilities.Participants: The cohort included 49,277 adult COVID-19 patients who were hospitalized from December 1, 2019 to November 13, 2020.Methods: We compared patients’ age, gender, individual components of Charl­son and Elixhauser comorbidities, medical complications, use of do-not-resuscitate, use of palliative care, and socioeconomic status between various racial and/or ethnic groups. We further compared the rates of in-hos­pital mortality and non-routine discharges between various racial and/or ethnic groups.Main Outcome Measures: The primary outcome of interest was in-hospital mortali­ty. The secondary outcome was non-routine discharge (discharge to destinations other than home, such as short-term hospitals or other facilities including intermediate care and skilled nursing homes).Results: Compared with White patients, in-hospital mortality was significantly higher among African American (OR 1.5; 95%CI:1.3-1.6, P<.001), Hispanic (OR1.4; 95%CI:1.3-1.6, P<.001), and Asian or Pacific Islander (OR 1.5; 95%CI: 1.1-1.9, P=.002) patients after adjustment for age and gender, Elixhauser comorbidities, do-not-resuscitate status, palliative care use, and socioeconomic status.Conclusions: Our study found that, among hospitalized patients with COVID-2019, African American, Hispanic, and Asian or Pacific Islander patients had increased mortality compared with White patients after adjusting for sociodemographic factors, comorbidities, and do-not-resuscitate/pallia­tive care status. Our findings add additional perspective to other recent studies. Ethn Dis. 2021;31(3):389-398; doi:10.18865/ed.31.3.389