Systems and methods for managing machine-generated alerts of a medical event such as worsening heart failure (WHF) are described. A patient management system includes a patient database of information about a correspondence between a plurality of alert thresholds (ATHs) and corresponding clinical outcome indicators (COIs) for a plurality of patients. A control circuit can query the patient database for a matching patient that meets specific query criteria compared to a target patient, retrieve an ATH-COI correspondence associated with the matching patient, and determine the alert threshold using a user input of a COI and the retrieved ATH-COI correspondence. A medical event detector detects the medical event using physiological signals sensed from the target patient and the determined alert threshold.