Risk Adjustment for Measuring Health Care Outcomes, 3rd edition

Abstract

Lisa I. Iezzoni (editor) Hardback, 508 pp, August 2003, ISBN 1-56793-207-X, $76.50, AcademyHealth/HAP (http://www.ache.org/hap.cfm) Lisa Iezzoni and colleagues produced the first edition of Risk Adjustment for Measuring Health Care Outcomes nearly 10 years ago. At that time, payers and researchers were concerned with risk adjustment primarily as a tool for hospital payment and for assessing hospital performance. Although the Health Care Financing Administration had ceased issuing Medicare risk-adjusted mortality rate reports, several other hospital performance reporting projects were then underway, such as New York State’s coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) surgery mortality project, Pennsylvania’s hospital outcomes reporting project, and the Cleveland Health Quality Choice program. In the years since the publication of the first edition, interest in risk adjustment in health care has expanded greatly. Risk adjustment continues to be used in hospital quality and efficiency reports, but now it is also a frequent input to health plan capitation calculations, and it is used with increasing frequency for measuring and reporting the performance of physicians, networks, groups, and even individuals. In addition to state agencies, researchers, and health plans, now purchasers—primarily large employers and business coalitions—have entered the field as major consumers of health provider performance information. Additional types of outcomes and new data sources and statistical methodologies have emerged, …