Date and Time
March 5, 2008
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM

Availability
Open to the public
No RSVP required

Speaker
Todd H. Wagner - Stanford University

Over three decades ago, Wennberg and colleagues showed how health service use varied by geographic area. Since then, new fields of research, including the health disparities literature, have emerged, but the results are frequently confounded by a number of unobserved factors including patient preferences, provider skills/preferences and the hospital's technology. The literature on how provider skills and training is associated with health care use and patient outcomes is particularly thin.

The main innovation in this study comes from a comparison of all inpatient discharges at a large, urban hospital where patients were randomly assigned to physician teams affiliated with one of two very different academic institutions. All patients admitted to the hospital were randomized based on the last digit of the social security number (odd or even). We will present results from the universe of over 70,000 inpatient discharges from 1993-2006, along with subsamples of patients with a diagnosis of chronic heart failure (CHF), a gastro-intestinal bleed, a myocardial infarction and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.