A measure of continuity of care based on the multiplicative intensity model

Continuity of care is a concept that is frequently used to measure patient satisfaction and other benefits provided by the health care system. Although several measures of continuity of care are used, most are built on unrealistic assumptions about random visits to providers and do not utilize all available information. In this paper we advocate stochastic processes to model continuity of care, and we propose a new measure of provider continuity based on the multiplicative intensity model. Using data on hypertensive patients in the province of Alberta, Canada, we demonstrate the utility of our method that incorporates ways to accommodate covariate information. Compared to the currently popular method, the proposed method in this paper is shown to assess both concentration of care aspects and other visit-based characteristics of the care being provided.