Date of Award
January 2014
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
Department
Economics & Finance
First Advisor
Chih Ming Tan
Abstract
Kidney transplant prevalence and costs have been increasing steadily in the past few decades and this trend is anticipated to continue for years to come. Patient outcomes are heavily influenced by the amount of time they are waiting for a transplant and by the quality of care they are receiving up to the transplant. This paper intends to increase positive patient outcomes and decrease costs by identifying potential kidney transplant patients earlier than traditional methods. I use medical claims data to determine common risk factors of all patients who have received a kidney transplant. For the control group I include all patients who have not received a kidney transplant. I used a binary logistic regression utilizing common risk factors determined by the claims data to determine what factors are significant and which ones have a larger impact on predicting kidney transplantation. This approach attempts to predict patient health outcomes using claims data instead of clinical data which is often used in other research methods.
The results of my analysis were that the risk factors found in clinical research of kidney transplantation were the same risk factors found using medical claims data. I determined diabetes, hypertension and end stage renal disease were strong indicators of potential kidney transplantation using claims data alone. My conclusion is that medical claims data can be used in place of clinical data when clinical data is not available or does not exist.
Recommended Citation
Dischinger, Jeffrey, "Predicting Kidney Transplantation Using Prior Disease Diagnosis From Medicare Claims Data" (2014). Theses and Dissertations. 1526.
https://commons.und.edu/theses/1526