Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jan 12, 2026

Inverse Probability of Treatment Weighting Propensity Score using the Military Health System Data Repository and National Death Index
Published on: January 8, 2020
Incidence, Persistence, and Steady-State Prevalence in Coding Intensity for Health Plan Payment
Thomas G McGuire1, Oana M Enache2, Michael Chernew1
1Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
Objective:
To define measures of Medicare diagnosis coding intensity that capture the dynamics of changes in coding practices.
Study Setting And Design:
Retrospective analysis of coding for risk adjustment using observational claims data from Medicare beneficiaries.
Data Sources:
Enrollment and claims data from 2017 and 2018 of a random 20% sample of Medicare beneficiaries were subset to those assigned to an Accountable Care Organization in 2018.
Principal Findings:
We decompose the prevalence of a diagnosis code into incidence (proportion of beneficiaries that newly have the code) and persistence (proportion of beneficiaries who previously had the code and continue to do so). Together these define steady-state prevalence, the hypothetical long-run prevalence implied by no changes in current rates of incidence and persistence of coding. Steady-state prevalence can help explain why observed prevalence tends to grow over time without continued behavioral change. For example, our measures suggest that the prevalence of the Specified Heart Arrhythmias diagnosis would continue to rise from 18.7% in 2018 to 28.0% without changes in coding practices.
Conclusions:
Researchers and policymakers can better understand why changes in coding practices can take years to be fully reflected in data and monitor coding behavior by using our proposed measures.
More Related Videos
06:16Signal Acquisition, Score Interpretation, and Economics of a Non-Invasive Point-of-Care Test for Coronary Artery Disease
Published on: August 9, 2024
10:46A Method of Trigonometric Modelling of Seasonal Variation Demonstrated with Multiple Sclerosis Relapse Data
Published on: December 9, 2015
Related Concept Videos
Prevalence and Incidence
Prevalence indicates the proportion of individuals in a population who have a specific disease or health...
Models of Health Promotion and Illness Prevention II
The agent-host-environment model states that disease results...
Levels of Health Promotion and Illness Prevention
In primary prevention, actions taken before disease onset prevent the disease from...
Types of Biopharmaceutical Studies: Controlled and Non-Controlled Approaches
Non-controlled studies, commonly employed for initial exploration, lack a control group, rendering them susceptible to biases and external influences. In contrast,...
Planning Nursing Care I
Hazard Rate