The Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) implemented risk adjustment for Medicare capitated organizations January 2000. The risk adjustment system used, the Principal Inpatient Diagnostic Cost Group (PIPDCG) method, had to be incorporated into the payment structure mandated by the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 (BBA). This article describes how risk adjustment was integrated into the paymen...

The purpose of this study was to develop a method for risk adjusting nursing home quality indicators (QI's). The QI's measure incidence and prevalence of resident-level care processes and outcomes which are indicative of care quality. Risk adjustment was carried out by stratifying residents into risk groups (high and low), calculating QI rates within groups, and then drawing comparisons across ...

To lead the development and maintenance of comprehensive and integrated health information that enables sound policy and effective health system management that improve health and health care. Introduction This document provides a technical description of the risk adjustment methodology for the Continuing Care Reporting System (CCRS) quality indicators (QIs) implemented by the Canadian Institut...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE It has been postulated that stress is part of the etiological process of Parkinson's disease (PD). The risk of PD was examined in a cohort of patients with adjustment disorders, a diagnosis made in the presence of a severe response to a stressful life event. METHODS Using Danish medical registries, PD occurrence was examined in a nationwide population-based cohort of pa...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The ischemic stroke population is heterogeneous. Even in balanced randomized trials, patient heterogeneity biases estimates of the treatment effect toward no effect when dichotomous end points are used. Risk adjustment statistically addresses some of the heterogeneity and can reduce bias in the treatment effect estimate. The purpose of this study was to estimate the treat...

CMS has had a continuing interest in exploring ways to incorporate frailty adjustment into the CMS Hierarchical Condition Categories (CMS-HCC) risk adjustment methodology for Medicare Advantage and other Medicare private organizations. In this article we present research results for Medicare risk adjustment of the frail elderly since the adoption of frailty adjustment for Program of All-Inclusi...