Description: Panelists discuss the methods HMOs employ to measure their providers' quality of care, outcomes, compliance with best practice guidelines, and cost control. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 25, No. 2.

Description: The Johns Hopkins ACG Team's comments regarding their participation in the Comparative Analysis of Claims-Based Tools for Health Risk Assessment.

Description: In this paper, we study a survival regression model known as Cox's proportional Hazards model. We assume that the data available are already grouped and develop a minimum distance estimation procedure that is also applicable when the data are also left or right censored. Asymptotic properties of the estimators are established and the numerical implementation of the method based on an iterated reweighted least squares algorithm is discussed.

Description: Users of statistical packages should be more aware of the influence that outlying data points can have on their statistical analyses. Robust procedures provide formal methods to spot these outliers and reduce their influence. While a few robust procedures are mentioned in this article, one is emphasized and it is motivated by maximum likelihood estimation to make it seem more natural. In this article, the author will try to provide some background, beginning with maximum likelihood estimation of one parameter, that will hopefully make robust estimation seem natural and rather easy.