Congratulations to Sharon-Lise Normand, who will be recognized as the 2018 Mosteller Statistician of the Year by the Boston Area Chapter of the American Statistical Association.
Wednesday, February 21, 2018
6:00pm Social | 6:30pm Dinner | 7:15 Presentation
Countway Library, 506 Minot Room, HMS
Register for tickets by 2/16
Statistics and Healthy Policy
Health Policy research involves understanding who gets access to health care, how much health care costs, and what are the consequences of the care (or lack of care) delivered. In the majority of cases, researchers rely upon observational data for these answers. In this talk, I will discuss 2 seemingly new problems associated with long histories of statistical debate. The first involves the U.S. Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program that took effect in October 2012 with a goal of reducing Medicare payments to hospitals having excess readmission rates. The statistical problem is to infer whether a hospital has excess readmission risk and uses this as a basis for payment policies. The second problem concerns the determination of the long-term health and economic burden to public healthcare payers associated with excess metabolic risk caused by second generation antipsychotic (SGA) drugs utilized by their enrollees. The statistical problem requires inferring effects caused by SGAs delivered in the absence of randomization and uses the inference to identify utilization management tools or other policy levers to improve care.