Improving Survey Inference Using Administrative Records Without Releasing Individual-Level Continuous Data.

Probability surveys are challenged by increasing nonresponse rates, resulting in biased statistical inference. Auxiliary information about populations can be used to reduce bias in estimation. Often continuous auxiliary variables in administrative records are first discretized before releasing to the public to avoid confidentiality breaches.

LATENT SUBGROUP IDENTIFICATION IN IMAGE-ON-SCALAR REGRESSION.

Image-on-scalar regression has been a popular approach to modeling the association between brain activities and scalar characteristics in neuroimaging research. The associations could be heterogeneous across individuals in the population, as indicated by recent large-scale neuroimaging studies, for example, the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. The ABCD data can inform our understanding of heterogeneous associations and how to leverage the heterogeneity and tailor interventions to increase the number of youths who benefit.

Embedded multilevel regression and poststratification: Model-based inference with incomplete auxiliary information.

Health disparity research often evaluates health outcomes across demographic subgroups. Multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) is a popular approach for small subgroup estimation as it can stabilize estimates by fitting multilevel models and adjust for selection bias by poststratifying on auxiliary variables, which are population characteristics predictive of the analytic outcome. However, the granularity and quality of the estimates produced by MRP are limited by the availability of the auxiliary variables' joint distribution; data analysts often only have access to the marginal distributions.

Association Between Organizational Quality and Out-of-Network Primary Care Among Accountable Care Organizations That Care for High vs Low Proportions of Patients of Racial and Ethnic Minority Groups.

Importance: Medicare accountable care organizations (ACOs) that disproportionately care for patients of racial and ethnic minority groups deliver lower quality care than those that do not, potentially owing to differences in out-of-network primary care among them.

Objective: To examine how organizational quality is associated with out-of-network primary care among ACOs that care for high vs low proportions of patients of racial and ethnic minority groups.

Design Setting And Participants: A retrospective cohort study was conducted between March 2019 and October 2021 using claims data (2013 to 2016) from a national sample of Medicare beneficiaries.

An empirical evaluation of alternative approaches to adjusting for attrition when analyzing longitudinal survey data on young adults' substance use trajectories.

Objectives: Longitudinal survey data allow for the estimation of developmental trajectories of substance use from adolescence to young adulthood, but these estimates may be subject to attrition bias. Moreover, there is a lack of consensus regarding the most effective statistical methodology to adjust for sample selection and attrition bias when estimating these trajectories. Our objective is to develop specific recommendations regarding adjustment approaches for attrition in longitudinal surveys in practice.

Beyond Vaccination Rates: A Synthetic Random Proxy Metric of Total SARS-CoV-2 Immunity Seroprevalence in the Community.

Background: Explicit knowledge of total community-level immune seroprevalence is critical to developing policies to mitigate the social and clinical impact of SARS-CoV-2. Publicly available vaccination data are frequently cited as a proxy for population immunity, but this metric ignores the effects of naturally acquired immunity, which varies broadly throughout the country and world. Without broad or random sampling of the population, accurate measurement of persistent immunity post-natural infection is generally unavailable.

Use of Preventive Care Services and Hospitalization Among Medicare Beneficiaries in Accountable Care Organizations That Exited the Shared Savings Program.

Importance: Thirty percent of Medicare accountable care organizations (ACOs) in the Shared Savings Program (SSP) have exited within five years of joining. Absent the potential for shared savings, exiting ACOs may choose to divest from costly resources needed to support population health, worsening clinical quality for beneficiaries aligned to these organizations.

Objective: To examine the associations of SSP exit with clinical quality.

Routine Hospital-based SARS-CoV-2 Testing Outperforms State-based Data in Predicting Clinical Burden.

Throughout the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, government policy and healthcare implementation responses have been guided by reported positivity rates and counts of positive cases in the community. The selection bias of these data calls into question their validity as measures of the actual viral incidence in the community and as predictors of clinical burden. In the absence of any successful public or academic campaign for comprehensive or random testing, we have developed a proxy method for synthetic random sampling, based on viral RNA testing of patients who present for elective procedures within a hospital system.

Who Returns? Understanding Varieties of Longitudinal Participation in MIDUS.

This study describes a major effort to reinstate dropouts from the MIDUS longitudinal study and compare baseline characteristics among subgroups of participants to better understand predictors of retention, attrition, and reinstatement. All living dropouts were contacted, and 651 reinstated participants were interviewed in person (31.4% response rate).

Conceptualizing protective family context and its effect on substance use: Comparisons across diverse ethnic-racial youth.

: Although family behaviors are known to be important for buffering youth against substance use, research in this area often evaluates a particular type of family interaction and how it shapes adolescents' behaviors, when it is likely that youth experience the co-occurrence of multiple types of family behaviors that may be protective The current study ( = 1716, 10th and 12th graders, 55% female) examined associations between protective family context, a latent variable comprised of five different measures of family behaviors, and past 12 months substance use: alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, and e-cigarettes. A multi-group measurement invariance assessment supported protective family context as a coherent latent construct with partial (metric) measurement invariance among Black, Latinx, and White youth. A multi-group path model indicated that protective family context was significantly associated with less substance use for all youth, but of varying magnitudes across ethnic-racial groups.

Bayesian profiling multiple imputation for missing hemoglobin values in electronic health records.

Electronic health records (EHRs) are increasingly used for clinical and comparative effectiveness research, but suffer from missing data. Motivated by health services research on diabetes care, we seek to increase the quality of EHRs by focusing on missing values of longitudinal glycosylated hemoglobin (A1c), a key risk factor for diabetes complications and adverse events. Under the framework of multiple imputation (MI), we propose an individualized Bayesian latent profiling approach to capture A1c measurement trajectories subject to missingness.

Bayesian inference under cluster sampling with probability proportional to size.

Cluster sampling is common in survey practice, and the corresponding inference has been predominantly design based. We develop a Bayesian framework for cluster sampling and account for the design effect in the outcome modeling. We consider a two-stage cluster sampling design where the clusters are first selected with probability proportional to cluster size, and then units are randomly sampled inside selected clusters.

A National Study of the Use of Asymptomatic Systemic Imaging for Surveillance Following Breast Cancer Treatment (AFT-01).

Background: Although not guideline recommended, studies suggest 50% of locoregional breast cancer patients undergo systemic imaging during follow-up, prompting its inclusion as a Choosing Wisely measure of potential overuse. Most studies rely on administrative data that cannot delineate scan intent (prompted by signs/symptoms vs. asymptomatic surveillance).

Utility of Clinical Breast Examinations in Detecting Local-Regional Breast Events After Breast-Conservation in Women with a Personal History of High-Risk Breast Cancer.

Background: Although breast cancer follow-up guidelines emphasize the importance of clinical examinations, prior studies suggest a small fraction of local-regional events occurring after breast conservation are detected by examination alone. Our objective was to examine how local-regional events are detected in a contemporary, national cohort of high-risk breast cancer survivors.

Methods: A stage-stratified sample of stage II/III breast cancer patients diagnosed in 2006-2007 (n = 11,099) were identified from 1217 facilities within the National Cancer Data Base.