don't worry about controlling for practice. you've already controlled for
it with the doctor id (i.e., they're perfectly multicollinear). so just
run: clogit referred, group(doctorid)
and any possible confounding effects of "practice" will be captured & controlled for by doctorid.
On Mon, 8 Sep 2003, Ricardo Ovaldia wrote:
(...)
Can I simply take the number of referrals at one
practice and divide by the number of patients seen at
that practice (referral rate for practice 1) and
compare it to the rate of the other practice without
taking in account that some physicians within practice
may refer more than others? Or, should I compute the
referral rate for each physician, and then combine
these rates within practice by weighting them some
how? If so how can I do this in Stata? what kind of
weights should I use?
Ricardo.
--- Ricardo Ovaldia <[email protected]> wrote:
We are interested in comparing the referral rates
for two physician practices. The fist group has 20
physicians and the second group has 22 physicians.
Each physician saw a variable number of similar
patients some saw as few as 4 and others as many as
43. The physician either referred the patient to a
specialist or did not.
If I compute the referral rate for each physician
group and compare them, I concerned because the
observations are not independent. (...) I though that I could use clogit- to group by
doctor ID: . clogit referred practice, group(doctorid)
This did not work because the practice-variable does
not vary within doctor ID, so it is dropped from the
model (omitted due to no within-group variance).
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
=====
Ricardo Ovaldia, MS, Statistician, Oklahoma City, OK
Study question: do referral rates (possibly patterns) differ between
practices (evidently composed of different physicians...)?
