Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Many of the best practices discovered in the research community are never implemented in practice. Why is this the case? One reason is that physicians are overloaded with information and it is costly to cull the literature for best practice information. This is especially true when best practices are not clearly identified or change over…
In previous posts, I have explained how to create bootstrap estimates for a variety of statistics. Doing so is fairly simple and involves a 3 step procedure: Step 1: Using the observe data, create m boostrap data sets by using random resampling with replacement. Step 2: Calculate the statistic of interest for each bootstrap data…
How does Medicare measure patient case mix? For the most part, Medicare uses the Hierarchical Condition Category (HCC) model. A recent CMS presentation describes the HCC model in more detail. Today I review where CMS applies the HCC model, provide an overview of the HCC methodology, briefly describe its performance, and give some background on…
Physicians earn high salaries. The Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that the median primary care physicians made $186,044, and specialists typically earn $339,738. Some physicians earn much more than that, but not always through legitimate means. Consider the case of Dr. Jacques Roy: Federal law enforcement officials announced charges in the largest healthcare fraud scam…
Team Chemistry. Medical uses of abused drugs. How the smart get rich. The waiting room principle. MiniBid.
The latest edition of the Health Wonk Review is up at one of my favorite blogs, Managed Care Matters.