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Publication alert: Diffusion of digital mammography in the US

Building on some of my previous worked that examined this topic in New York State, a team of researchers recently published its analysis of the diffusion of digital mammography in the US in the journal Cancer. Digital mammography went from being all but nonexistent in 2001 to nearly universal in 2014, as seen in this…

Publication alert: The geography of Medicare’s hospital value-based purchasing

Medicare presently withholds 2% of participating hospitals’ base operating Medicare Severity Diagnosis-Related Group (MS-DRG) payment amounts and redistributes it based on relative performance and demonstrated improvement. It is supposed to function as a reward for hospitals doing well and a motivator for those not. In 2019, the amount redistributed was $1.9 billion, with 44% of…

Improving upon a bar graph

In my preceding post, I showed how to replicate a typical Quickstats graph from the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. But such a bar graph is rather information-poor. There are only 24 pieces of data: the mean and the 95% confidence limit for each of the sex-age strata. (You could argue that the upper…

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