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Modeling and Analysis of Cost Data

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Health Services Evaluation

Part of the book series: Health Services Research ((HEALTHSR))

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Abstract

Cost has become an important outcome in health services research. It can be used not only as a measure for health care spending but also as a measure for a part of health care value. Given ever-increasing rising health care expenditure, the value of health care should include not only traditional measures, such as mortality and morbidity, but also the cost of health care. Due to a limited resource, a new treatment with a slightly better efficacy but much higher cost than an existing treatment may not be a choice of a treatment for a patient. Hence, it is important to be able to approximately analyze cost data. However, appropriately analyzing health care costs may be hindered by special distribution features of cost data, including skewness, zero values, clusters, heteroscedasticity, and multimodality.

Over the decades, various methods have been proposed to address these features. This chapter would be devoted in introducing methods that are able to provide relatively trustworthy results with acceptable efficiency, covering topics on mean inference, regression, and prediction.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biostatistics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Shizhe Chen

  2. Beijing International Center for Mathematical Research, Peking University, Beijing, China

    XH Andrew Zhou

  3. VA Puget Sound Healthcare System, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    XH Andrew Zhou

Authors
  1. Shizhe Chen
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  2. XH Andrew Zhou
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to XH Andrew Zhou .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Community Health and Epidemiology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada

    Adrian Levy

  2. ICON plc, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Sarah Goring

  3. Department of Biostatistics, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

    Constantine Gatsonis

  4. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Boris Sobolev

  5. European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, Department of Health Care Management, Berlin University of Technology, Berlin, Germany

    Ewout van Ginneken

  6. Department Health Care Management Faculty of Economics and Management, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Reinhard Busse

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Chen, S., Zhou, X.A. (2019). Modeling and Analysis of Cost Data. In: Levy, A., Goring, S., Gatsonis, C., Sobolev, B., van Ginneken, E., Busse, R. (eds) Health Services Evaluation. Health Services Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-8715-3_31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-8715-3_31

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4939-8714-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4939-8715-3

  • eBook Packages: MedicineReference Module Medicine

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