Assessing risk factors prior to blood testing will improve the specificity, with little cost in sensitivity, of screening for diabetes in a medical center setting. The target population which optimizes the potential value of diabetes screening is patients with at least 1 of the above 3 risk factors for diabetes (obesity, hypertension, family history). Hypertension is strongly associated with unrecognized diabetes in veterans. VA and other health care providers considering whether to perform systematic screening for diabetes should use known risk factors to identify an appropriate target population for screening.