disembarked in james river geneva, aviator sunglasses from the amtrak chassis. whose experience will you be heightening today? when last cockroach consumes final lichen / no grander earthly feast will there have been but after one salad, two beers at the pizzeria: can i interest you in dessert? / yes, one pepperoni please the more scientific literature i read, the more i know our fates etched in the stars. will neural networks out-triangulate myers-briggs with categorical precision? type abcdefghijtuvwxyz so we expect a goth phase of two to thirteen years with 95% confidence
read how to carry out a literature search for a systematic review: a practical guide by lauren z. atkinson & andrea cipriani
how to develop the search protocol
'grey' literature (informally published material such as conference abstracts)
a paradigmatic example demonstrating the importance of capturing unpublished data is that of turner et al
(2008), who showed that using only published data in their
meta-analysis led to effect sizes for antidepressants that were
one-third (32%) larger than effect sizes derived from combining both
published and unpublished data
the prisma (preferred reporting
items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses) statement was developed
to standardise the reporting of systematic reviews (moher 2009). the
prisma statement consists of a 27-item checklist to assess the quality
of each element of a systematic review (items 6, 7 and 8 relate to the
quality of literature searching) and also to guide authors when
reporting their findings
pico (population, intervention, comparator and outcome)
a
balance between the sensitivity of a search (an attempt to retrieve all
relevant literature in an extensive search) and the specificity of a
search (an attempt to retrieve a more manageable number of relevant
citations) is optimal
in both medline and embase an 'explode'
command enables the database to search for a requested term, as well as
specific related terms
variable retrieval of content (due to
regular updating of google algorithms and the individual's search
history and location) means that search results are not necessarily
reproducible and are therefore not in keeping with replicable search
methods required by systematic review
read who is poor, how poverty has changed, and why it matters: poverty measurement in the u.s. and its implications for policy by jeehoon han, bruce d. meyer, and james x. sullivan
small samples in current consumption datasets make it difficult to construct poverty statistics at the subnational level
information on resource sharing across cohabitors is not collected in the current population survey, although resources or cost-sharing provided to a family by cohabitors may be substantial. the treatment of cohabitors has become more important in recent years as the fraction of households with cohabitors present has risen
all of the major poverty indicators in the u.s. rely on survey data
in 1995, only 36 percent of food stamp dollars paid out to families were not recorded in the cps. by 2020 that figure had risen to 55 percent. in 1995, only 15 percent of unemployment insurance dollars were missed, but by 2020 that figure had reached a shocking 62 percent of the over half a trillion dollars paid out that year
the observable characteristics of those with very low income strongly suggest that income is mis-measured for this group. for example, those with income below 50 percent of the poverty cut-off appear better off than those below 100 percent, and many families with extremely low reported income in surveys are actually well off in consumption terms..this evidence is particularly worrisome for measures that focus on deep income poverty or extreme income poverty
income poverty rates are much greater than consumption poverty rates for the elderly
in 2020, two-thirds of those in the bottom income quintile of the elderly owned a home; conversely, for the bottom income quintile of children, 38 percent lived in an owned home
when out-of-pocket medical expenses are subtracted from income to calculate poverty, those identified as "poor" have higher consumption, more education, more rooms in their home and are more likely to be covered by health insurance
poverty has fallen sharply
for well-measured consumption to be an adequate proxy for total consumption its share of total consumption must be roughly constant, a condition that did not hold in the most recent year due to the pandemic
the most noticeable decline over this period is in consumption-based poverty for the elderly, which fell 25.7 percentage points (92 percent), and now stands at 2.2 percent
we scale income by (a + 0.7)k^0.7, where a is the number of adults in the family and k is the number of children
we may not have won the war on poverty, but we are certainly winning
read challenges with effective price transparency analyses by gary claxton, lynne cotter, and shameek rakshit
the amount of data made available by payers under the tic rule is massive
sometimes, it is quite easy to spot unlikely rates in these situations. for example, neither a clinical lab nor a psychiatric hospital is likely to be paid over $270,000 for a heart procedure. however, it can be more difficult for services that could be provided either in the hospital or in one of its affiliated parts. these situations make it difficult to give credence to rates reported
easy to understand, but not necessarily easy to use
analysts averaging rates for unique npis may not realize that their results are skewed because they are inadvertently including the same provider multiple times
because the data contains no information on the local enrollment in each network, data users have no way of knowing which approach might be closer to the right one
rate structures differ
a problem for data users
the reporting of multiple rates for what otherwise are identical situations suggests that other factors may be affecting results that are not being captured by the reporting schema
turquoise health has estimated that as much as 60 percent of the reported rates may be ghost rates
it is hard to see any pattern in the reporting
payers are not required to lay out an explanation of the decisions that they made when constructing their in-network rate files
one of the weaknesses of price data as compared to claims data is that there is no way to know whether or how often a particular price is used. this uncertainty is extended when a price is reported multiple times for different networks because, absent some external information on the relative enrollment in different networks, there is no way to know whether one network is somehow more important than another; in general, most people would be more interested in knowing the price for a service in a network that has 10,000 enrollees as compared to a network with ten enrollees
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