Hierarchical and joint site-edge methods for medicare hospice service region boundary analysis.

ABSTRACT: Hospice service offers a convenient and ethically preferable health-care option for terminally ill patients. However, this option is unavailable to patients in remote areas not served by any hospice system. In this article, we seek to determine the service areas of two particular cancer hospice systems in northeastern Minnesota based only on death counts abstracted from Medicare billing records. The problem is one of spatial boundary analysis, a field that appears statistically underdeveloped for irregular areal (lattice) data, even though most publicly available human health data are of this type. In this article, we suggest a variety of hierarchical models for areal boundary analysis that hierarchically or jointly parameterize both the areas and the edge segments. This leads to conceptua

SUBMITTER: Ma H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3061258 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature