Network Dynamics of Physician Care Networks

• Activity Number: 554
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 12, 2015 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): Figaro Loresto* and Daniel Jupiter and Deepak Adhikari and Taylor Sohn Riall and Yong-Fang Kuo
• Companies: The University of Texas Medical Branch and The University of Texas Medical Branch and The University of Texas Medical Branch and The University of Texas Medical Branch and The University of Texas Medical Branch
• Keywords: Social Network ; Physicians ; Medicare

Abstract

Real-world social networks are often dynamic in nature, with changes occurring when a particular node leaves or enters a network. These changes affect the structure of the network, and understanding these changes can yield information on how a particular network functions, grows, and evolves. Network evolution has been studied in many areas: airports, email networks, and scientific collaboration networks. Lacking is an examination of the growth and evolution of physician care networks. Using an approach in which shared patients among physician are ties, we seek to understand the dynamics of these networks over time. We obtain physicians from a select Medicare cohort of Houston doctors involved in breast biopsies. We looked at the three year span from 2009 to 2011. Preliminary results suggest stability over time with few nodes leaving and entering. The minimum number of nodes in the network was 459 while the maximum was 474. The physician networks consist of disjoint components whose number of components changed slightly over time, with larger components exhibiting a scale-free property.