How to choose a Bayesian prior

Bayesian analysis is increasingly common in health economic research.  To apply Bayesian models, however, you need to select a prior distribution.  How do you select your prior?  Andrew Gelman (of the excellent Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog) provides some advice on selecting a prior on the stan-dev GitHub website.  I review some…

Is Quality of Care within a Hosptial Homogeneous?

According to a paper by Zhang, Hauck and Zhao (2013), the answer is ‘no‘.   Using a Bayesian approach (i.e., three-level random intercept probit mode) the authors find that different specialties within the same hospital can provide very different quality of care to the patients.  The authors summarize their findings as follows: Of the variation in…

Berkson’s Paradox Explained

What is Berkson’s paradox? Assume that there are two independent events, A and B.  These events are not correlated when observed in nature.  However, what if one conditions on the fact that either A or B occurs.  By conditioning on the fact that one of the two events occurred, these events are now correlated. If…

Measuring Hospital Quality

How does one measure hospital quality? Quality occurs along multiple dimensions. Thus, to summarize overall quality, one must create a weighting scheme to compete the distinct quality measures in a single measure. In most cases, quality measures should also account for differences in patient case mix. Hospitals should not be punished with lower quality scores…