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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% ofContinue reading “Publication alert: The geography of Medicare’s hospital value-based purchasing”

In addition to the consulting projects I work on, I have been teaching an introductory statistics course online for a number of years. My teaching assistant this semester pointed out a seeming inconsistency that no one had ever raised before. Two widely-used methods in R for calculating the p-value for a two-sided binomial hypothesis testContinue reading “Finding the p-value for a binomial hypothesis test”

We’ve updated the Yost Index at the census tract level for 2015-2019 as follows: Moved the file to figshare. Figshare is a repository for figures (hence the name), data, tables – whatever researchers need to make available that goes beyond what can be contained within a research paper. The link here is to the dataContinue reading “Yost Index update”

The Yost Index has been updated with 2015-2019 data, this time with margins of error attached. The margins of error represent 90% confidence intervals as calculated using the Census Bureau’s variance replicate tables. For the most part, the Yost Index values are precise to about plus or minus 8 points, but there is plenty ofContinue reading “The Yost Index has been updated with margins of error”

When we say that a neighborhood ranks a 3 or a 47 or a 91 on a scale of 1 to 100, we tend to treat that as an exact quantity. There are no exact quantities in science, of course, and a client challenged me to figure out what the uncertainty was around a socioeconomicContinue reading “The margin of error around the Yost Index”