Description
The HA1C blood test provides a way to see the average blood sugar levels of a patient during the two to three months prior to the test, and doctors recommend that the test be administered four times per year for diabetes patience. The goal of this project was to see whether compliance to this recommendation can be seen in the 2012 medicare doctor billing and referral data.
To protect patient privacy, the data is aggregated by doctor, and data for doctors with less than 11 patients is omitted. Therefore, the data contains the number of tests billed and the number of patients. We call the ratio of these two values the poke ratio, and ideally the value would be four.
A number of real-world factors result in the poke ratio being considerably lower, however. If a patient was diagnosed mid-year, he or she would receive less than four tests. Similarly, the test is used for purposes other than monitoring diabetes and may not be administered as frequently. Finally, some experts recommend that patients that have their diabetes under control only need the test twice per year.Even with these limitations, the poke ratio provides a view into the compliance of the test’s usage for monitoring diabetes patients.
The main result of this project is an interactive map of the United States where users can see the poke ratio by state and within each state by county. A gradient of colors is used to show visualize the differences. The data for each state and county is aggregated by doctor address. Thus there is some error due to patients who cross state and/or county boundaries.
The interactive map can be seen here. The data processing for this project was done in Python using NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, and MatPlotLib. The interactive map was generated using D3 and JavaScript.
The data contains the zip code for each doctor, but not the county. To resolve each zip code to an individual county, we used the ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs) provided by the U.S. Census Bureau.
This project was completed during the Spring 2015 offering of CSCI 334 System Design and Implementation, the senior capstone experience for computer science majors at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA. The students in the course were Jason Boccuti, Steven Chakif, Lewis Cooper, Jon Diehl, Hansen Huang, and Michael Vitone. The faculty member in charge of the course was Dr. Ben Coleman.
