Visualizing nationwide variation in medicare Part D prescribing patterns.

ABSTRACT:

Background

To characterize the regional and national variation in prescribing patterns in the Medicare Part D program using dimensional reduction visualization methods.

Methods

Using publicly available Medicare Part D claims data, we identified and visualized regional and national provider prescribing profile variation with unsupervised clustering and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) dimensional reduction techniques. Additionally, we examined differences between regionally representative prescribing patterns for major metropolitan areas.

Results

Distributions of prescribing volume and medication diversity were highly skewed among over 800,000 Medicare Part D providers. Medical specialties had characteristic prescribing patterns. Although the number

SUBMITTER: Rosenberg A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6245567 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature