Measuring Therapeutic Efficiency of Diagnostic Activity in Medicare: An Exploratory Analysis.

摘要

The report explores use of Medicare administrative data to measure the efficiency of medical care episodes associates with high volume expensive diagnostic procedures. It relates the frequency of a diagnostic procedure to the frequency of the clinically associated therapeutic or preventive intervention that usually follows. The report also introduces the concept of 'yield' of a diagnostic procedure, which is defined as the ratio of interventions to diagnostic procedures. It indicates that in selected clinical areas, the analysis of yield may be useful for monitoring program efficiency and in monitoring access of Medicare beneficiaries to important surgical technologies.