1 - Overview of Performance Analytics for Healthcare with Examples in R

Summary

The goal of this chapter is to introduce the reader to the wide range of methods used for performance analysis in healthcare. Specifically, it starts with a brief outline of what the authors refer to as the basic analytics of healthcare performance analysis, with an emphasis on hospitals. Although relatively simple, such basic performance analytics are popular approaches in practice: They are useful for exploring and presenting the data before proceeding with more sophisticated methods, and they provide a bridge for communication between practitioners and academics. To facilitate the discussion, they authors provide brief empirical illustrations using real data sets as well as supply the relevant R codes of the examples. They then briefly describe other major approaches for performance analysis in healthcare as a primer for the following chapters.