Abstract
To appropriately assess the impact of the establishment of community-based outpatient clinics (CBOCs) on the total health care costs in a VA study, we need to deal with three methodological problems inherent in the data. The first problem is skewness of the data. The second one is zero costs for some patients. The third one is heteroscedasticity. We proposed a semi-parametric heteroscedastic two-part transformation regression model to deal with these problems, and the proposed model would allow us to explicit model heteroscedasticity.
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Acknowledgements
Professor Xiao-Hua Zhou is presently a Core Investigator and Senior Biostatistician at the Northwest HSR&D Center of Excellence within the VA Puget Sound Health Care System. Matt Maciejewski is presently a Core Investigator at the Northwest HSR&D Center of Excellence within the VA Puget Sound Health Care System. The research reported here was supported by Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Administration, Health Services Research and Development Service, ECI-03-206 and in part by AHRQ grant R01HS013105. We would like to thank John Fortney for providing us with the data.
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Zhou, X.H., Qin, G. & Maciejewski, M.L. Estimating the VA total health care cost using a semi-parametric heteroscedastic two-part model. Health Serv Outcomes Res Method 6, 69–80 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10742-006-0007-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10742-006-0007-y