How Good Is Machine Learning in Predicting All-Cause 30-Day Hospital Readmission? Evidence From Administrative Data.

Objectives: Hospital readmission is a main cost driver for healthcare systems, but existing works often had poor or moderate predictive results. Although the available information differs in different studies, improving prediction is different from the search for important explanatory variables. With large sample size and abundant information, this study explores state-of-the-art machine-learning algorithms and shows their performance in prediction.

End-Of-Life Medical Spending In Last Twelve Months Of Life Is Lower Than Previously Reported.

Although end-of-life medical spending is often viewed as a major component of aggregate medical expenditure, accurate measures of this type of medical spending are scarce. We used detailed health care data for the period 2009-11 from Denmark, England, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Taiwan, the United States, and the Canadian province of Quebec to measure the composition and magnitude of medical spending in the three years before death. In all nine countries, medical spending at the end of life was high relative to spending at other ages.

Physician payment mechanisms, hospital length of stay and risk of readmission: evidence from a natural experiment.

We provide an analysis of the effect of physician payment methods on their hospital patients' length of stay and risk of readmission. To do so, we exploit a major reform implemented in Quebec (Canada) in 1999. The Quebec Government introduced an optional mixed compensation (MC) scheme for specialist physicians working in hospital.

Health and income: a robust comparison of Canada and the US.

This paper uses sequential stochastic dominance procedures to compare the joint distribution of health and income across space and time. It is the first application of which we are aware of methods to compare multidimensional distributions of income and health using procedures that are robust to aggregation techniques. The paper's approach is more general than comparisons of health gradients and does not require the estimation of health equivalent incomes.