Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

An Empirical Study Of Small-Area Variation For Icd-9 Surgical Procedures, Paula Diehr, Kevin Cain, Zhan Ye, John Loeser

UW Biostatistics Working Paper Series

Objective. Several measures of variation have been used in SAVA. One study of DRGs found that the coefficient of variation from analysis of variance (CVA) had superior performance. That work is replicated here for ICD-9 surgical procedures, and extended to age/sex-standardized rates. Results are compared with those in the literature, and recommendations are made for assessing small-area variation in future studies.

Data Sources. Data were taken from Washington State's "Episode of Illness" file of hospital discharges in the State in 1987. Up to three ICD-9 surgical procedures and a unique patient identifier were available for each discharge.

Study Design. We …