Handbook of Healthcare Analytics

17 Econometric Methods

Diwas KC

Emory University

17.1 Introduction

The healthcare industry faces important challenges, including rising costs, increasing complexity, and quality issues, while confronting increased demand for limited resources. For most of the advanced economies that foresee demographic changes associated with a shrinking workforce, aging population, and the attendant complexity of disease management, the resulting socioeconomic and public health challenges are particularly pressing.

Meeting these challenges calls for more efficient models of care delivery, well‐informed governmental policies, and innovative new products and services. In this regard, data can play a crucial role in uncovering new insights and in allowing the various stakeholders including patients, providers, payers, and policymakers to make more informed decisions.

To that end, the healthcare industry generates significant amounts of data, such as transactional data that is often the natural byproduct of care provision. Data sources range from RFID‐enabled tracking devices used to monitor patient flows and resource usage within a hospital to connected devices, such as pacemakers that relay biometric data to a cardiologist's office. More commonly used sources of data include hospital‐level claims data submitted to payers for reimbursement, as well as the online reviews of providers by individual patients.

The growing availability of novel data sets can help to uncover important actionable ...