Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, Bioinformatics Presents:

Speaker: Kevin He, PhD, Associate Professor of Biostatistics, University of Michigan

Existing methods for healthcare provider profiling typically assume that the risk adjustment is perfect and the between-provider variation is entirely due to the quality of care. In practice, there are patient and, potentially, provider characteristics that are not completely accounted for (e.g. unobserved socio-economic factors and comorbidities). Many of these characteristics relate to the outcome and vary across providers. Some between-provider variation in a quality measure will typically be due to this incomplete risk adjustment, which should be recognized in monitoring providers. We propose an individualized empirical null method to account for the unexplained variation between providers. The method models the between-provider variance as a function of effective provider size and avoids bias against large providers.