Ben Pollock, PhD

In 100,000 simulations of Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Overall Star Ratings for U.S. hospitals, only 9%, including less than two-thirds of 5-star rated facilities, achieved reliable excellence. ja.ma/44rpegY @Pollock_BD

@NateSilver538 How would the life expectancy curves look if adjusted for Gini coefficient? I suspect there is massive amount of confounding here although it doesn’t detract from the general point.

OK, it's possibly not optimal to post this at 11:15 in the evening, but the newsletter has been slow this week so what the hell. My review-that-I'm-not-calling a review of Abundance. I think these graphics are pretty revealing.

Hospitals with better pre-pandemic star ratings had better mortality rates for both COVID and non-COVID patients during the early pandemic. We can learn about hospital resiliency by reporting pandemic era outcomes. @CMSGov @BMJ_Open @SeanDowdy1 bmjopen.bmj.com/content/14/2/e…

Numb3rs.

When it comes to healthcare, there is rarely—if ever—a debate about whether a patient wants quality care. In this podcast @DrTimMorg discusses Quality or Counterfeit? The Science of Quality Measurement with @Pollock_BD. mayocl.in/3JzILSH

We are absolutely thrilled and honored to announce that I have received the prestigious Mayo Clinic Diamond Award! 🎉 This lifetime recognition is a testament to the countless hours of hard work and dedication we have put into improving the quality of car…lnkd.in/eg4Af8aJ

For non-COVID patient outcomes such as mortality, evidence-based inclusion of pandemic-era data is methodologically plausible and must be explored rather than exclusion of months or years of relevant patient outcomes data @SeanDowdy1 @USNewsHealth bmjopenquality.bmj.com/content/12/1/e…

@jbcowartmd Looks good send some my way

They always say the groundhog is 40% accurate. But it’s a binary outcome and over 150 yrs of predictions his 95% CI is approx. 32-48% so he technically has 52-68% predictive accuracy not 40%.

@baileymeyers Egregious

hey kids who learned their vocab from reading, what word that you mispronounced still haunts you

Measuring health care quality becomes even more important during a system-wide crisis. Learn more from @Pollock_BD on an innovative solution using @CMSGov data. mayocl.in/3ii0vaM

@medrxivpreprint has a disclaimer that articles are pre-print not peer-reviewed. Scientists should make the same disclaimer when tweeting pre-prints. We need guidelines to responsibly promote science on Twitter. Or maybe @elonmusk can add a yellow exclamation to pre-print tweets.

@hongfangliu True! I won’t fault anyone with good intentions. I hope AI can detect good intention and lead to peer-review clicks versus one liner clicks.

@Pollock_BD People may have good intention - Kudo to those “nice” social media AI recommendation systems which bury rigor science by those one liners as those solid studies do not have catchy lines.

Suffering is not a competition. Health services researchers should strive to help everyone and should not invest in non-peer reviewed, one-liner, un-nuanced equivalencies on Twitter. The shame of the 2020s decade will be that science was touted by pre-print and Twitter.

Earlier your team predicted an above average season. Is this lack of activity within the original model’s uncertainty bounds or did some original assumptions not hold?

@weatherchannel is it going to rain in ST AUGUSTINE FL?

@Huggies Baby’s first words

Today, we lost a giant. As tall as Bill Russell stood, his legacy rises far higher—both as a player and as a person.

#MayoClinic has once again been ranked the No. 1 hospital in the nation for the seventh consecutive year by @usnews in its "Best Hospitals" rankings. mayocl.in/3zzP7NC #USNewsandWorldReport #BestHospitals