Quality of Care Assessment

In this project, BAI addressed the problem of health care outcomes assessment and adjustments of health care outcomes data to account for case mix and patient risk. Problems with indirect standardization, which is the most common methodology utilized in risk-adjusting health care outcomes, were clearly identified and highlighted. A new approach for assessing health care outcomes, which addresses many of the shortcomings of the conventional method, was developed using a decision-theoretic framework. The effectiveness of the approach was demonstrated successfully using a combination of actual patient-level administrative databases (e.g., Health Care Cost and Utilization Project State Inpatient Databases) and synthetic, computer-generated data (the latter was used where "truth" information was necessary to formally demonstrate a concept).