The move to value-based payments is well underway and accelerating. The shift is putting unprecedented pressure on health care providers to better manage the cost and quality of care they deliver. Who will have a much better shot of success? Organizations that understand how well they are performing, where they have opportunities to improve
Smallpox was declared eradicated in 1979, after an extensive vaccination campaign in the 19th and 20th centuries. This blog post contains a visual analysis of the final years of this disease in the US ... In my previous blog post, I imitated and improved infectious disease graphs from a recent Wall
The Wall Street Journal recently published some graphs about seven infectious diseases, and I tried using SAS to improve the graphs ... it's a veritable infectious disease (graph) bake-off! Let's start with Measles ... here's a screen-capture of WSJ's measles graph: In general, their graph is eye-catching, and I learned a lot
The impact of mental illness on individuals, families, the health system and even the economy is broad and significant. In this, the latest post in my mental health series, I’d like to talk about what can be done to help. Prevention and early detection are just parts of an integrated
A recent news headline read, “Bipartisan committee wants government-subsidized electronic records systems scrutinized for ‘information blocking.’” * The question before the US Senate Appropriations Committee is whether taxpayer-funded EHR software solutions are now preventing the unrestricted exchange of medical records between health care organizations. If this is in fact the case,
There are many ways to use SAS in Health & Life Sciences, and one of my favorite is using it to track the spread of diseases. This post demonstrates how to layer several customized maps to track the recent Ebola outbreak in Africa. In this blog post, I describe how I
You've all heard about the recent meningitis outbreak, right? Being a data-guy and a map-guy, I went looking for maps related to the outbreak. I found the following map on the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) website. It shows the states that received the recalled drug used in epidurals (for back
