RISK ADJUSTMENT TOOLS FOR ANALYZING PATIENT ELECTRONIC DISCHARGE RECORDS

A system and method are disclosed for examining and effectively managing resource allocation in a health care organization or facility (e.g., a hospital, a hospice, or a nursing home). The disclosed technology relies upon an analysis of the electronic discharge records of a health care organization in a manner that allows extraction of only those records that were generated for patients having a specified condition (e.g., septic shock, coronary artery disease, auto-immune disease, etc.) or fall into a particular class based upon resource usage (e.g., length of hospital stay, type of surgery, or quantity and type of pharmaceuticals taken). Note that discharge records often fail to explicitly specify the condition of interest. To accomplish selective extraction, the content of the discharge records is matched against one or more "key explanatory variables" such as a "selection vector" which is collection of patient codes that implicitly specify the condition of interest.