- What is the network structure of healthcare providers and their practices/clinics?
- What is their patient sharing pattern?
- Does sharing of patient information between providers lead to better health outcomes?
- Do practice size and patient sharing behaviour influence the quality of healthcare?
Australian Medicare claims data contains
data1 on tens of thousands of healthcare providers and millions of
patients, such as patient characteristics
(age, sex, …)
and provider characteristics
(specialty, type and frequency of services delivered, bulk-billing behaviour,
…).
The natural structure of these data is a network, where providers & patients are connected whenever a service is provided. The structure of this network contains crucial information on the flow of information and the variation of healthcare quality, and thus allows to tackle questions of national importance such as the above.
- de-identified, of course. ^