Exploring relationships between medical college rankings and performance with big data

• Published in: Big data analytics 2019-04, Vol.4 (1), p.1-24, Article 3
• Main Authors: Rao, A. Ravishankar, Clarke, Daniel
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Big Data; Clinical outcomes; Data analysis; Data management; Education; Efficiency; Graduates; Hospitals; Medicaid; Medical education; Medical schools; Open data; Physicians; Primary care; Professionals; Researchers; Statistical significance; Students
• ISSN: 2058-6345; 2058-6345
• DOI: 10.1186/s41044-019-0040-9

Background It is important to examine the cost-effectiveness of medical education. The public wants to know how government spending is being utilized to train doctors. There are very few studies that examine national data to understand the relationships between medical education and outcomes. We used Big Data analytics with open health data to explore answers. We joined physician data and hospital total performance score data reported by Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), containing information for nearly 600,000 practitioners and performance scores from three thousand hospitals in the United States. We combined this data medical college costs from the American Association of Medical Colleges and medical school rankings. We used Mullan’s social mission to compare medical schools. We also computed the correlation between the rankings of 4-year baccalaureate colleges in the US published by the Wall Street Journal, and the in-state tuition at these colleges in the Integrated Post-secondary Education System database. Results We found a statistically significant but negligible correlation (Spearman rank correlation − 0.04, p-value