Exploring variation in low-value care: a multilevel modelling study

BACKGROUND: Whether patients receive low-value hospital care (care that is not expected to provide a net benefit) may be influenced by unmeasured factors at the hospital they attend or the hospital’s Local Health District (LHD), or the patients’ areas of residence. Multilevel modelling presents a method to examine the effects of these different levels simultaneously and assess their relative importance to the outcome. Knowing which of these levels has the greatest contextual effects can help target further investigation or initiatives to reduce low-value care. METHODS: We conducted multilevel logistic regression modelling for nine low-value hospital procedures. We fit a series of six models for each procedure. The baseline model included only episode-level variables with no multilevel structure. We then added each level (hospital, LHD, Statistical Local Area [SLA] of residence) separately and used the change in the c statistic from the baseline model as a measure of the contribution of the level to the outcome. We then examined the variance partition coefficients (VPCs) and median odds ratios for a model including all three levels. Finally, we added level-specific covariates to examine if they were associated with the outcome. RESULTS: Analysis of the c statistics showed that hospital was more important than LHD or SLA in explaining whether patients receive low-value care. The greatest increases were 0.16 for endoscopy for dyspepsia, 0.13 for colonoscopy for constipation, and 0.14 for sentinel lymph node biopsy for early melanoma. SLA gave a small increase in c compared with the baseline model, but no increase over the model with hospital. The VPCs indicated that hospital accounted for most of the variation not explained by the episode-level variables, reaching 36.8% (95% CI, 31.9–39.0) for knee arthroscopy. ERCP (8.5%; 95% CI, 3.9–14.7) and EVAR (7.8%; 95% CI, 2.9–15.8) had the lowest residual variation at the hospital level. The variables at the hospital, LHD and SLA levels that were available for this study generally showed no significant effect. CONCLUSIONS: Investigations into the causes of low-value care and initiatives to reduce low-value care might best be targeted at the hospital level, as the high variation at this level suggests the greatest potential to reduce low-value care. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12913-019-4159-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.