Physicians, judges, teachers, and agents in many other settings differ systematically in the
decisions they make when faced with similar cases. Standard approaches to interpreting …

Low-value health care services that provide little or no benefit to patients are common,
potentially harmful, and costly. Nearly half of the patients in the United States will receive at …

For Medicare beneficiaries with chronic illness near the end of life, quality, outcomes, and
cost vary markedly across regions and hospitals. The health care delivered to these patients …

Palliative care (PC) is beneficial, however, in many settings it is under-resourced and unable
to consistently meet the needs of patients and their families. A lack of national health policy …

Importance Little is known about small-area variations in health care spending and
utilization across the 3 major funders of health care in the US: Medicare, Medicaid, and …

Background Healthcare systems around the world experience increasing pressure to control
future growth of healthcare expenditures. Among other initiatives, quality and value-based …

Importance While variations in quality of care have been described between US regions,
physician-level practice pattern variations within regions remain poorly understood, notably …

Financial constraints can cause firms to reduce product quality when quality is difficult to
observe. We test this hypothesis in the context of medical choices at hospitals. Using heart …

Diagnosing constitutes a substantial part of healthcare work and triggers a wide range of
actions including the prescription of medicines. Dediagnosing is proposed as a novel …

Background: Data analysis is used to identify signals suggestive of variation in treatment
choice or clinical outcome. Analyses to date have generally focused on a hypothesis-driven …