Ensuring 'the cupboard's not bare': Assessing adequacy of resources for statistical consulting in health plans and agencies serving vulnerable populations

Health care expansion implies larger patient populations and greater demands on finite resources. Statisticians in healthcare organizations, face a dual challenge: (a) meeting greater demand for analyses to guide improvements in services and access; while (b) harried administrators reluctantly staff non-clinical functions such as statistics. Best practices in staffing and organizing analytic departments in agencies and health plans are not widely studied or reported.

(1) Study design: The briefing reports results from a small-sample study among agencies and health plans serving vulnerable populations, about their staffing, resources, roles, and organizational placement of statistics and analytics. Respondents were interviewed primarily by telephone or emailed surveys.

(2) Settings: The study uses purposive sampling to get data points from diverse organizations, including stronger and weaker performers to assess the merits of their staffing strategies. The sampling targeted statisticians, analysts, or their administrators, focusing on quality improvement as a functional area typically present in health plans.

(3) Findings: The briefing reports: numbers of analytic staff; training; client departments; types of analysis; technical level of statistical work; software and computing resources.

(4) Analysis: The presentation will include comparisons of how statistical consulting is deployed in anonymous higher- and lower-performing healthcare organizations; and comparisons of differences in their practices.

(5) Uses: The study provides a template for statisticians and administrators to assess statistical staffing and resources in their organizations, against best practices elsewhere. The findings are designed to guide improvements in the organization of analytic resources to support decision-makers adapting to dramatic changes in health care.