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

Finding the p-value for a binomial hypothesis test

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”

The Yost Index has been updated with margins of error

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”