Analyses of health 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 Using Claims Data
Cohort studies evaluate health outcomes by comparing groups of individuals receiving different or innovative 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 using claims data extends well beyond drug trials and includes evaluation of health care services delivered using different processes and protocols across different sites of service. We use propensity scores to match our comparison and test groups, often within the framework of difference-in-difference econometric models.

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 correspond to the severity of covered populations. We closely follow Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services attempts to adjust for severity and apply their techniques to our client engagements.