Analyses of Patient Outcomes

Analyses of health care policy often requires an understanding of the underlying clinical needs of specific patient populations and the therapies used to treat them. We link our clinical understanding with our methodological expertise to determine the likely impact of proposed interventions on patient populations.

Cohort Studies
Cohort studies evaluate health outcomes by comparing groups of individuals receiving different interventions. Cohort studies have long been used in medicine and are frequently used to evaluate pharmaceutical therapies through clinical trials. The value of cohort studies extends beyond drug trials, and includes evaluation of health care services delivered using different processes and protocols across different sites of service.

Outcome Studies / Severity of Patients / Case Mix Analyses
Health care providers often treat patients with similar health care needs but differing levels of clinical severity. For health care providers, more severely ill patients will be more costly to treat. Determining the outcome of medical interventions requires that the patient populations be "adjusted" for differences in illness severity. We help our clients better understand the severity of their various patient groups through case-mix analyses. We also investigate how case mix measures influence public program payments. A critical question is the degree to which public payments match the severity of covered populations.