Evidence map›Paper›PMID 28369273›Full record

ArticleBiostatistics (Oxford, England)2017

Computational health economics for identification of unprofitable health care enrollees.

Sherri Rose, Savannah L Bergquist, Timothy J Layton

Open access · hybridAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Biostatistics (Oxford, England), 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
13citing papers in PubMed
3.9field-weighted citation impact, top 7% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

13 citing papers in PubMed, 24 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. Article
  2. Article
  3. Article
  4. Article
  5. Article
  6. Article
  7. Article
  8. Observational
  9. Article
  10. Article
  11. Article
  12. Article
  13. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.

Sherri RoseDepartment of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, 180 Longwood Ave, Boston, MA, 02115, USA.
Savannah L BergquistDepartment of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, 180 Longwood Ave, Boston, MA, 02115, USA.
Timothy J LaytonDepartment of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, 180 Longwood Ave, Boston, MA, 02115, USA.
Harvard University · US

Funding

Health Policy Training Program: Promoting Outcomes, Quality, Equity and Diffusion of AdvancesT32MH019733 · NIMH · HARVARD UNIVERSITY (MEDICAL SCHOOL) · PI Benjamin Le Cook, Haiden A Huskamp · 1993 to 2026
$7.0M
Mental Health Coverage in Health Care ReformR01MH094290 · NIMH · HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL · PI MCGUIRE, THOMAS G. · 2011 to 2015
$2.1M
NIMH NIH HHS R01 MH094290NIMH NIH HHS T32 MH019733
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Health insurers may attempt to design their health plans to attract profitable enrollees while deterring unprofitable ones. Such insurers would not be delivering socially efficient levels of care by providing health plans that maximize societal benefit, but rather intentionally distorting plan benefits to avoid high-cost enrollees, potentially to the detriment of health and efficiency. In this work, we focus on a specific component of health plan design at risk for health insurer distortion in the Health Insurance Marketplaces: the prescription drug formulary. We introduce an ensembled machine learning function to determine whether drug utilization variables are predictive of a new measure of enrollee unprofitability we derive, and thus vulnerable to distortions by insurers. Our implementation also contains a unique application-specific variable selection tool. This study demonstrates that super learning is effective in extracting the relevant signal for this prediction problem, and that a small number of drug variables can be used to identify unprofitable enrollees. The results are both encouraging and concerning. While risk adjustment appears to have been reasonably successful at weakening the relationship between therapeutic-class-specific drug utilization and unprofitability, some classes remain predictive of insurer losses. The vulnerable enrollees whose prescription drug regimens include drugs in these classes may need special protection from regulators in health insurance market design.

Indexed as

Machine LearningAlgorithmsDrug PrescriptionsFormularies as TopicHealth Insurance ExchangesHumansInsurance, Pharmaceutical ServicesClassification and predictionEnsemblesMachine learningStatistical methods in health economicsVariable selection

Identifiers

PMID28369273
PMCPMC5862318
OpenAlexW2600399649

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.