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Hector P. Rodriguez, PhD
Professional Bio
Hector P. Rodriguez, PhD, MPH, is a Faculty Associate at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and an Associate Professor of health services at the UCLA School of Public Health. Rodriguez's research focuses on understanding organizational influences on medical care quality and public health system effectiveness, performance measurement and patients' experiences of ambulatory care. His research has been published widely in prominent peer-reviewed health services and medical journals
Project Description
Valid and reliable patient-reported ambulatory care experience measures are central to a balanced portfolio of quality measures and indispensable to the goal of a patient-centered health care system. There is general appreciation that the measures should be adjusted for case mix because the measures may not perform equivalently across all patient groups. Systematic biases in patient reports by age, race/ethnicity, education and/or primary language of respondents, however, might result in unfavorable survey scores for physician practices that care for high concentrations of racial and ethnic minorities. As a result, there is some concern that pay-for-performance programs, which rely on ambulatory care experience measures to assess performance, will negatively affect physicians that care for high concentrations of racial and ethnic minority patients. These practices might be further disadvantaged because of lower financial incentive compensation relative to other physician practices.
This study examines differential item functioning (DIF) or item-level measurement bias with respect to race/ethnicity, age, education and primary language spoken at home for clinician and group CAHPS survey measures. In addition to estimating the magnitude of DIF impact on survey scores for individual patients, the research assesses the extent to which scores that account for DIF affect the relative performance ranking of physicians, with an emphasis on that care for high concentrations of racial and ethnic minority patients.
What New Connections Means for my Career
New Connections is a fantastic opportunity for underrepresented junior faculty to pursue important public health and health care research, while being connected to a large network of prominent scholars. The program has provided me the opportunity to learn new research methods important for advancing our understanding on how to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in health care quality.
Research Interests
Organizational Theory Applications in Health Services Research; Patients' Experiences of Ambulatory Care; Care Team Performance; Continuity of Care and Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Ambulatory Care Quality
Discipline(s)
Health Policy; Medical Sociology
Populations Served
Latinos, African-Americans, and Asian-Americans.