Evaluating disease management program effectiveness: an introduction to time-series analysis.
Currently, the most widely used method in the disease management (DM) industry for evaluating program effectiveness is referred to as the "total population approach." This model is a pretest-posttest design, with the most basic limitation being that without a control group, there may be sources of bias and/or competing extraneous confounding factors that offer a plausible rationale explaining the change from baseline. Furthermore, with the current inclination of DM programs to use financial indicators rather than program-specific utilization indicators as the principal measure of program success, additional biases are introduced that may cloud evaluation results. This paper presents a non-technical introduction to time-series analysis (using disease-specific utilization measures) as an alternative, and more appropriate, approach to evaluating DM program effectiveness than the current total population approach.
Linden
Ariel
A
Linden Consulting Group, 6208 NE Chestnut Street, Portland, OR 97124, USA. ariellinden@yahoo.com
Adams
John L
JL
Roberts
Nancy
N
D019468:Disease Management; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D005544:Forecasting; D006801:Humans; D017059:Models, Econometric; D010043:Outcome and Process Assessment, Health Care; D015397:Program Evaluation / Q000379:methods*; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care; D013997:Time Factors