Health insurers often pay health plans to manage the care of their members. Good care can help prevent emergencies, such as avoidable trips to a hospital emergency department (ED). Medically complex patients, such as those with behavioral health problems or substance use disorders, tend to have a lot of ED visits. Social determinants of health… Read More »
What accounts for large differences in life expectancy from one neighborhood to another? This post explains what our team has discovered so far using an “artificially intelligent” approach to understanding social risk at the local level. Where you live affects how long you live In 2018, when the National Center for Health Statistics released the… Read More »
With the current focus on social risk factors (SRFs) affecting health care, it is not surprising that methods for comparing hospital performance might do well to account for such factors in their assessment. If up to 70 percent of health outcomes are driven by factors beyond medical care, and measures used to compare hospitals focus… Read More »
One of the challenges in delivering efficient medical care is identifying people who are at risk of a negative outcome, so we can focus our efforts on screening and treating those at elevated risk. We do this in individual face-to-face encounters through clinical, diagnostic processes: taking a patient’s history, performing a physical examination, recording signs… Read More »
Recently, I sat down to talk with Arlene Ash, PhD about risk adjustment. Dr. Ash is Professor and Chief of the Division of Biostatistics and Health Services Research, Department of Quantitative Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. As a methods expert on risk adjustment in health services research, she has pioneered tools… Read More »
Since the launch of Nursing Home Compare (NHC) in 2002, consumers have had access to information about the quality of care provided by most nursing homes (NHs) throughout the country. The intention is to help consumers distinguish among NHs and motivate informed decision making based on quality. For NHC to be useful, the quality measures… Read More »