The movement to measure medical care quality has been accelerating, spurred on by evidence of poor quality of care and trials of interventions to improve care. Appropriate measurement of quality of care is an essential aspect of improving the quality of care, yet some quality measures may be influenced by patients' attributes unrelated to quality of care. Risk adjustment is the term commonly ap...

Few capitation arrangements vary premiums by a child's health characteristics, yielding an incentive to discriminate against children with predictably high expenditures from chronic diseases. In this article, we explore risk adjusters for the 35 percent of the variance in annual out-patient expenditure we find to be potentially predictable. Demographic factors such as age and gender only explai...

Comorbid conditions are highly prevalent in dialysis patients and are significant predictors of mortality and other adverse outcomes. Accordingly, it is important to account for differences in comorbid illness burden among groups of dialysis patients being compared. At present, there is no consensus on what conditions matter, how each should be defined, and what weights each carries when defini...

BACKGROUND An individual's socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with health outcomes and mortality, yet it is unknown whether accounting for SES can improve risk-adjustment models for 30-day outcomes among Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services beneficiaries hospitalized with heart failure. METHODS AND RESULTS We linked clinical data on hospitalized patients with heart failure in the Ge...

We use prospective couple-level data from the Changing Lives of Older Couples to assess the extent to which spouses concur in their assessments of marital quality (N= 844) and whether discrepancies in spouses’ marital assessments affect the bereaved spouse’s psychological adjustment 6 months after loss (n= 105). Spouses’ assessments of marital quality are correlated modestly (r= .45), with wome...