Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch.
Multidimensional performance assessment of public sector organisations using dominance criteria. Health Economics [RePEc] Published 18th August 2017
The empirical assessment of the performance or quality of public organisations such as health care providers is an interesting and oft-tackled problem. Despite the development of sophisticated methods in a large and growing literature, public bodies continue to use demonstrably inaccurate or misleading statistics such as the standardised mortality ratio (SMR). Apart from the issue that these statistics may not be very well correlated with underlying quality, organisations may improve on a given measure by sacrificing their performance on another outcome valued by different stakeholders. One example from a few years ago showed how hospital rankings based upon SMRs shifted significantly if one took into account readmission rates and their correlation with SMRs. This paper advances this thinking a step further by considering multiple outcomes potentially valued by stakeholders and using dominance criteria to compare hospitals. A hospital dominates another if it performs at least as well or better across all outcomes. Importantly, correlation between these measures is captured in a multilevel model. I am an advocate of this type of approach, that is, the use of multilevel models to combine information across multiple ‘dimensions’ of quality. Indeed, my only real criticism would be that it doesn’t go far enough! The multivariate normal model used in the paper assumes a linear relationship between outcomes in their conditional distributions. Similarly, an instrumental variable model is also used (using the now routine distance-to-health-facility instrumental variable) that also assumes a linear relationship between outcomes and ‘unobserved heterogeneity’. The complex behaviour of health care providers may well suggest these assumptions do not hold – for example, failing institutions may well show poor performance across the board, while other facilities are able to trade-off outcomes with one another. This would suggest a non-linear relationship. I’m also finding it hard to get my head around the IV model: in particular what the covariance matrix for the whole model is and if correlations are permitted in these models at multiple levels as well. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting take on the performance question, but my faith that decent methods like this will be used in practice continues to wane as organisations such as Dr Foster still dominate quality monitoring.
A simultaneous equation approach to estimating HIV prevalence with nonignorable missing responses. Journal of the American Statistical Association [RePEc] Published August 2017
Non-response is a problem encountered more often than not in survey based data collection. For many public health applications though, surveys are the primary way of determining the prevalence and distribution of disease, knowledge of which is required for effective public health policy. Methods such as multiple imputation can be used in the face of missing data, but this requires an assumption that the data are missing at random. For disease surveys this is unlikely to be true. For example, the stigma around HIV may make many people choose not to respond to an HIV survey, thus leading to a situation where data are missing not at random. This paper tackles the question of estimating HIV prevalence in the face of informative non-response. Most economists are familiar with the Heckman selection model, which is a way of correcting for sample selection bias. The Heckman model is typically estimated or viewed as a control function approach in which the residuals from a selection model are used in a model for the outcome of interest to control for unobserved heterogeneity. An alternative way of representing this model is as copula between a survey response variable and the response variable itself. This representation is more flexible and permits a variety of models for both selection and outcomes. This paper includes spatial effects (given the nature of disease transmission) not only in the selection and outcomes models, but also in the model for the mixing parameter between the two marginal distributions, which allows the degree of informative non-response to differ by location and be correlated over space. The instrumental variable used is the identity of the interviewer since different interviewers are expected to be more or less successful at collecting data independent of the status of the individual being interviewed.
Clustered multistate models with observation level random effects, mover–stayer effects and dynamic covariates: modelling transition intensities and sojourn times in a study of psoriatic arthritis. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C [ArXiv] Published 25th July 2017
Modelling the progression of disease accurately is important for economic evaluation. A delicate balance between bias and variance should be sought: a model too simple will be wrong for most people, a model too complex will be too uncertain. A huge range of models therefore exists from ‘simple’ decision trees to ‘complex’ patient-level simulations. A popular choice are multistate models, such as Markov models, which provide a convenient framework for examining the evolution of stochastic processes and systems. A common feature of such models is the Markov property, which is that the probability of moving to a given state is independent of what has happened previously. This can be relaxed by adding covariates to model transition properties that capture event history or other salient features. This paper provides a neat example of extending this approach further in the case of arthritis. The development of arthritic damage in a hand joint can be described by a multistate model, but there are obviously multiple joints in one hand. What is more, the outcomes in any one joint are not likely to be independent of one another. This paper describes a multilevel model of transition probabilities for multiple correlated processes along with other extensions like dynamic covariates and different mover-stayer probabilities.
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