Focusing healthcare quality improvement dollars: Using SAS for geographic targeting

Like many organizations, the health care quality improvement industry is charged with doing more with less. This can only be accomplished by careful scheduling of resources. Geographical differences in adherence to clinical guidelines have been demonstrated. In this paper, geographical analyses are used both to identify regions and providers for healthcare quality improvement targeting and to identify best practices in both the inpatient and outpatient settings. SAS, Output Delivery System (ODS) and SAS/GRAPH are used to generate the output. All output is created using SAS software, version 8.2 on a Windows 98 platform but are not intended to be platform specific. All SAS code is included in the paper.