Great paper from Dartmouth.

[physasst]

Wennberg, et al.

 

looked at illness adjustment models in hospital referral regions and the association with rate of physician visits and number of diagnoses in the administrative dataset.

 

it shows that looking at the number of visits associated with the number of diagnoses is biasing the burden of disease.

 

IOW, the more you see your provider the more diagnoses you accrue, but you are not really sicker.

 

Fascinating stuff.

 

http://www.bmj.com/highwire/filestream/632298/field_highwire_article_pdf/0/bmj.f549

[discogenic]

More on this, with an emphasis on EM:

http://trap.it/ddAZPf

 

And I think BMJ may be doing a series on this topic.