Alan M Zaslavsky

Harvard Medical School | HMS · Department of Health Care Policy

Covariate balance is crucial for unconfounded descriptive or causal comparisons. However, lack of balance is common in observational studies. This article considers weighting strategies for balancing covariates. We define a general class of weights---the balancing weights---that balance the weighted distributions of the covariates between treatment...

Many surveys use an inexpensive initial mode (e.g., mail questionnaires) and a more expensive follow-up mode (e.g., phone). The high unit costs of follow-up interviews may make it cost-effective to subsample the follow-up. We derive optimal follow-up subsampling rates for estimation with many domains. Optimal rates under design-based inference depa...

Objective: Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) during pregnancy is associated with several adverse maternal and perinatal outcomes. A reliable and valid screening tool for GAD should lead to earlier detection and treatment. Among pregnant Peruvian women, a brief screening tool, the GAD-7, has not been validated. This study aims to evaluate the reli...

Differences among hospitals in the use of inpatient consultation may contribute to variation in outcomes and costs for hospitalized patients, but basic epidemiologic data on consultations nationally are lacking. The purpose of the study was to identify physician, hospital, and geographic factors that explain variation in rates of inpatient consulta...

Significance Our finding of a significant gene-by-birth-cohort interaction adds a previously unidentified dimension to gene-by-environment interaction research, suggesting that global changes in the environment over time can modify the penetrance of genetic risk factors for diverse phenotypes. This result also suggests that presence (or absence) of...

Supplementary Materials Code.

Supplementary Materials.

Balance in the covariate distributions is crucial for an unconfounded descriptive or causal comparison between different groups. However, lack of overlap in the covariates is common in observational studies. This article focuses on weighting strategies for balancing covariates. We define a general class of weights---the balancing weights---that bal...

The identification of causal peer effects (also known as social contagion or induction) from observational data in social networks is challenged by two distinct sources of bias: latent homophily and unobserved confounding. In this paper, we investigate how causal peer effects of traits and behaviors can be identified using genes (or other structura...

The recently enacted Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act makes collecting information on patients' health care experiences a national priority. The Medicare Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) Survey is the largest survey of Medicare beneficiaries about their care experiences. Each year, a nationally representativ...

To review methods of measuring racial/ethnic health care disparities. Identification and tracking of racial/ethnic disparities in health care will be advanced by application of a consistent definition and reliable empirical methods. We have proposed a definition of racial/ethnic health care disparities based in the Institute of Medicine's (IOM) Une...

To facilitate checking and improvement of a Bayesian model, we define an outlier as an observation or group of observations that is “surprising” relative to its predictive distribution, under the model, given the remainder of the data. Hence outlyingness can be measured by the posterior predictive case-deleted p-value of any interesting scalar summ...

The ability to track improvement against racial/ethnic disparities in mental health care is hindered by the varying methods and disparity definitions used in previous research. Nationally representative sample of whites, blacks, and Latinos from the 2002 to 2006 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. Dependent variables are total, outpatient, and prescr...

To facilitate checking and improvement of a Bayesian model, we define an outlier as an observation or group of observations that is "surprising" relative to its predictive distribution, under the model, given the remainder of the data. Hence outlyingness can be measured by the posterior predictive case-deleted p-value of any interesting scalar summ...

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services pays for services provided through traditional fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare and managed care plans (Medicare Advantage [MA]). It is important to understand how financing and organizational arrangements relate to quality of care. To compare care experiences and preventive services receipt in traditional...

Risk selection in the Medicare managed care program ("Medicare Advantage") is an important policy concern. Past research has shown that Medicare managed care plans tend to attract healthier beneficiaries and that market characteristics such as managed care penetration may also affect risk selection. To assess whether patient enrollment in Medicare...

To present an overview of the design and field procedures of the National Comorbidity Survey Replication Adolescent Supplement (NCS-A). The NCS-A is a nationally representative face-to-face household survey of the prevalence and correlates of DSM-IV mental disorders among U.S. adolescents (aged 13-17 years) that was performed between February 2001...

To report results of the clinical reappraisal study of lifetime DSM-IV diagnoses based on the fully structured lay-administered World Health Organization Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) Version 3.0 in the U.S. National Comorbidity Survey Replication Adolescent Supplement (NCS-A). Blinded clinical reappraisal interviews with a pr...

We consider optimal sampling rates in element-sampling designs when the anticipated analysis is survey-weighted linear regression and the estimands of interest are linear combinations of regression coefficients from one or more models. Methods are first developed assuming that exact design information is available in the sampling frame and then gen...

Quality-of-life (QOL) is an important outcome in clinical research, particularly in cancer clinical trials. Typically, data are collected longitudinally from patients during treatment and subsequent follow-up. Missing data are a common problem, and missingness may arise in a non-ignorable fashion. In particular, the probability that a patient misse...

OBJECTIVE: There is increasing public discussion of the value of disclosing how physicians are paid. However, little is known about patients' awareness of and interest in physician payment information or its potential impact on patients' evaluation of their care.DESIGN: Cross-sectional surveySETTING: Managed care and indemnity plans of a large, nat...

The National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCS-R) is a survey of the prevalence and correlates of mental disorders in the US that was carried out between February 2001 and April 2003. Interviews were administered face-to-face in the homes of respondents, who were selected from a nationally representative multi-stage clustered area probability sam...

An overview is presented of the rationale, design, and analysis plan for the WMH-CIDI clinical calibration studies. As no clinical gold standard assessment is available for the DSM-IV disorders assessed in the WMH-CIDI, we adopted the goal of calibration rather than validation; that is, we asked whether WMH-CIDI diagnoses are 'consistent' with diag...

This paper studies a class of default priors, which we call single observation unbiased priors (SOUP). A prior for a parameter is a SOUP if the corresponding posterior mean of the parameter based on a single observation is an unbiased estimator of the parameter. We prove that, under mild regularity conditions, a default prior for a convolution para...

Together with the American Association of Health Plans (AAHP), we surveyed health maintenance organizations (HMOs) in 1998 to characterize their basic structure and management strategies. The findings show that more than half of HMO enrollees belong to plans that contract with primary care physician (PCP) groups on a predominantly capitated basis....

An item response theory model for ordinal responses proposes that the probability of a particular response from a person on an specific item is a function of latent person and question parameters and of cutoffs for the ordinal response categories. This structure was incorporated into a Bayesian hierarchical model by Albert and Chib (1993). We exten...

We propose an item response theory model for ordinal customer satisfaction data where the probability of each response is a function of latent person and question parameters and of cutoffs for the ordinal response categories. This structure was incorporated into a Bayesian hierarchical model by Albert and Chib. We extend this formulation by modelin...

We propose an item response theory model for ordinal customer satisfaction data where the probability of each response is a function of latent person and question parameters and of cutoffs for the ordinal response categories. This structure was incorporated into a Bayesian hierarchical model by Albert and Chib. We extend this formulation by modelin...

We demonstrate how case influence analysis, commonly used in regression, can be applied to Bayesian hierarchical models. Draws from the joint posterior distribution of parameters are importance weighted to reflect the effect of deleting each observation in turn; the ensuing changes in the posterior distribution of each parameter are displayed graph...

Surveys often first mail questionnaires to sampled subjects and then follow up mail nonrespondents by phone. The high unit costs of telephone inter-views make it cost-effective to subsample the fol-lowup. We derive optimal subsampling rates for the phone subsample for comparisons of health plans or other units. Computations under design-based infer...

ABSTRACT An overview is presented of the rationale, design, and analysis plan for the WMH-CIDI clinical calibration studies. As no clinical gold standard assessment is available for the DSM-IV disorders assessed in the WMH-CIDI, we adopted the goal of calibration rather than validation; that is, we asked whether WMH-CIDI diagnoses are ‘consistent’...