Projects currently underway focus on specific chronic conditions and quality of care for those conditions. We use large public and private administrative, claims, pharmaceutical, and disease-specific data sets and databases, including the Medicare 5% sample and the Medicare 100% ESRD data, and MedStat, Framingham, and NHANES data, to conduct long-range observational studies. Current and completed projects address the following issues:

• Anemia, epoetin use, and hemoglobin attainment
• Bayesian techniques to advance methods of healthcare provider profiling
• Bone and mineral metabolism medications and morbidity, mortality, and economic outcomes in dialysis patients
• Cardiac disease in the general Medicare population
• CKD, anemia, comorbidities, and trends of incidence and prevalence of these conditions
• Development of Bayesian hierarchical spatial models capable of showing geographic patterns
• Dialysis withdrawal and hospice use
• Epidemiology of anemia in the elderly
• Epidemiology of cognitive impairment in renal disease and diabetes
• Epidemiology of stroke in ESRD patients
• Interaction of anemia, chronic kidney disease, and congestive heart failure
• Parkinsonism and its association with disability and mortality
• Post-myocardial infarction death rates in patients with varying levels of CKD
• Projections of future numbers of ESRD/Dialysis patients
• Propensity scores as predictors of actual hemoglobin levels
• Total diabetes burden in the U.S. ESRD population
• Use of the instrumental variable approach to adjust biased effects of diabetic care on outcomes among aged populations
• Use of Marginal Structural Models to assess the impact of erythropoietin and hemoglobin on mortality
• Use of modeled rates to improve the stability in the standard incident and prevalence rates
• Use of the structural equation modeling technique to assess direct and indirect effects of hemoglobin level on medical costs in ESRD patients