Resumen de Methodological Challenges of Measuring Primary Care Delivery to Pediatric Medicaid Beneficiaries Who Use Community Health Centers.

Karen R. Tyo, Deborah Gurewich, Donald S. Shepard

• Efforts to measure quality of care have focused on ambulatory care providers. We examined the performance of community health centers serving children on Medicaid in 3 states. Descriptive analysis showed considerable patient population heterogeneity, and regression analysis demonstrated that variation explained by the assigned provider was small (mean R2 = 4.3%) compared with the variation explained by patient demographic variables (mean R2 = 29.9%). The results reinforce the need for caution when one is attributing quality differences to provider performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]