Fwd: qotd: Intensity bias in risk adjustment

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-------- Original Message --------
Subject: qotd: Intensity bias in risk adjustment
Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2013 12:38:56 -0800
From: Don McCanne <don@mccanne.org>
To: Quote-of-the-Day <quote-of-the-day@mccanne.org>



BMJ
February 21, 2013
Observational intensity bias associated with illness adjustment: cross
sectional analysis of insurance claims
By John E Wennberg, Douglas O Staiger, Sandra M Sharp, Daniel J
Gottlieb, Gwyn Bevan, Klim McPherson, H Gilbert Welch

Conclusions

We have shown that a method of risk adjustment that used data on
diagnoses and controlled for the effects of supply, by using data on the
frequency of visits by physicians in the year prior to a patient's
death, was more efficient than the standard method; but that still
accounted for less than 25% of geographic variation in age, sex, and
race adjusted mortality among fee for service Medicare beneficiaries.
Thus, our study points to the importance of developing risk adjustment
methods that better explain variation in age, sex, and race mortality
rates and suggests that these will be found by using data that are
clearly independent of the effects of supply.

http://www.bmj.com/content/346/bmj.f549#aff-1

And...

Kaiser Health News
February 21, 2013
Dartmouth Study Questions Widely Used Risk-Adjustment Methods
By Jordan Rau

In evaluating a hospital and health plan in the increasingly expensive
U.S. health care system, federal officials and researchers often first
factor in an assessment of how sick their patients are. A new study,
however, challenges the validity of several widely used
"risk-adjustment" efforts and suggests that Medicare is overpaying some
plans and facilities while underpaying others.

Without these risk adjustments to level the comparisons, a hospital with
more frail and very ill patients—who are more likely to die — might
incorrectly appear to be doing a worse job than a hospital with
healthier patients — who are more likely to survive.

Medicare risk-adjusts when determining how much to pay private Medicare
Advantage insurance plans. It also used risk adjustments when deciding
that 2,217 hospitals should be penalized for having high rates of
patient readmissions. Risk adjustment is also a key component in new
models of delivering care, such as the accountable care organizations.

The new study by the Dartmouth Atlas Project, published today in the
health journal BMJ, faults the practice of trying to assess how sick
patients are by looking at records to see patient diagnoses. The authors
argue that the more times patients see doctors or get tests, the more
new diagnoses they are given. "The more one looks, the more one finds,"
the authors wrote. The Atlas researchers have asserted in three decades
of research that areas of the country with gluts of hospital beds,
specialists and other providers tend to deliver more care, whether it's
needed or not.

"You would think sicker places would have higher visit rates, but they
don't," said Dr. John Wennberg, the lead author and the founder of the
Atlas.

Here's how their latest study worked: The researchers examined Medicare
records for more than 5 million beneficiaries in 306 different regions
of the country. They looked at three different formulas commonly used to
assess how sick patients are, each based on the number and nature of
diagnoses for patients as well their age, race and sex. Medicare uses
one of those methods, known as "hierarchical condition categories" (HCC)
to adjust for risk.

The researchers also analyzed the death rates of patient populations in
each of the 306 regions. They found that the sickness of the patients
explained between 10 and 12 percent of the discrepancy between places
with high mortality rates and those with low mortality rates. But there
was still a wide spread between regions of the country. For instance,
under the HCC method, the death rate in the Salt Lake City region was
59.3 patients per 1,000—much higher than around Miami, where the death
rate was 32.6 patients per 1,000. If that difference were accurate, then
it would appear that patients in Salt Lake City were getting
astoundingly worse care than in Miami—something that the researchers
considered implausible.

Next, the researchers looked at the number of physician visits the
patients had in the previous year. They then used statistical methods to
"correct" the sickness rates, essentially reclassifying those patients
with lots of excess physician visits as less sick than they would appear
based by their diagnoses alone.

When the researchers used this revised metric to look at regional death
rates, they now found it explained between 21 percent and 24 percent of
the differences between high-mortality and low-mortality areas—twice as
much as the standard risk-adjustment methods explained. Once visits were
factored into the equation, Salt Lake City's death rate dropped to 51.8
patients per 1,000 and Miami's rate rose to 47.3 percent. That was much
closer than before, although there remained an unexplained variation.

In a phone interview, Wennberg said the paper showed that the government
and others need to refine the methods of adjusting for risk. "The way
we're doing it now has a lot of problems," he said.

http://capsules.kaiserhealthnews.org/index.php/2013/02/dartmouth-study-questions-widely-used-risk-adjustment-methods/


Comment: Private insurers pride themselves on market innovation. They
will always find ways to reduce the amount that they spend on patients.
They use devious methods to selectively enroll healthier individuals
while receiving payments that are more appropriate for a mixture of both
the sick and the healthy. When efforts are made by means of risk
adjustment to modify payments to compensate for this injustice, insurers
will use data manipulations to make their patients appear to be even
sicker than they are in order to receive extra payments for their care.

This study by John Wennberg and his colleagues demonstrates that the
differing regional rates of visits by physicians introduces a bias that
makes it appear that regions with lower visits by physicians have higher
costs and higher mortality rates, and vice versa. They conclude that
correcting for such variations in intensity of patient observation
(physician visit rates) would improve current risk adjustment
methodologies, but that this would still account for "less than 25% of
geographic variation in age, sex, and race adjusted mortality among fee
for service Medicare beneficiaries."

We already know that the private Medicare Advantage plans play games
with risk adjustment. The Affordable Care Act will require risk
adjustment between the private plans offered by the state insurance
exchanges, and we can anticipate that they, too, will game the system.

Will this latest study finally bring us a risk adjustment process that
the insurers cannot game? Unlikely. As more data are added, such as the
intensity of patient observation suggested by this study, the
administrative complexity increases, while the insurers find ever more
not-yet-patched holes in the risk adjustment infrastructure.

As long as individual patients are linked to individual private plans,
there will always be intermediaries - the private insurers - who will
manipulate the system to their own benefit. We should remove these
superfluous, administratively inefficient middlemen and replace them
with our own public administrators. The task of negotiating appropriate
payments with health care professionals and institutions would be much
simpler if we got the private intermediaries out of the way.