In this article, I review An Introduction to Stata for Health Researchers, Fourth Edition, by Svend Juul and Morten Frydenberg (2014 [Stata Press]). Copyright 2014 by StataCorp LP.

Background: In a previous article using population-level data, an a priori number-needed-to-decrease (NND) analysis was conducted to determine if there is potential opportunity in a given population for a disease management program to achieve financial effectiveness. Critics of that study have...

Most health management programs, such as disease management or health promotion/wellness interventions, implement targeted interventions for an identified high-risk group, leaving the remaining non-managed lower-risk population as controls. This is problematic from an outcomes perspective...

Disease management (DM) program evaluations are somewhat limited in scope because of typically small sample sizes comprising important subsets of the treated population. Identifying subsets of the data that have differing results from the aggregate of the whole program can lend insight into...

The US disease management (DM) industry continues to endorse the use of the methodologically flawed pre-post design to evaluate financial outcomes, which regularly reports returns on investment of up to 8___1. This is in sharp contrast to the peer-reviewed literature and large Medicare...

Background: One particularly difficult challenge in evaluating disease management (DM) programs is defining the scope of economic outcomes to include in the evaluation. Measuring `all-cause utilization' or `total costs' assumes that a DM intervention impacts the entire spectrum of services...

Introduction: The ability of observational studies to draw conclusions on causal relationships between covariates and outcomes can be improved by incorporating randomly matched controls using the propensity scoring method. This procedure controls for pre-program differences between the enrolled...