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”
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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”
Yost Index update
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 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”
The margin of error around the Yost Index
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”