Patent ID: 7818181

Claim:
A method of managing medical care performed by a group of medical practitioners, comprising the steps of: compiling a plurality of episodes of care, each episode including services performed for that episode by medical practitioners; selecting for analysis the episodes of care from the plurality of the episodes of care that correspond to a given condition; preserving, with a computer, those services having a service value above a service value threshold defined such that only services that have a predetermined level of impact on the selected episodes of care are preserved; sorting, with the computer, the medical practitioners into the two or more cost strata according to a predefined cost criterion, the sorting occurring such that each stratum includes at least one medical practitioner who provided at least one service performed in the selected episodes of care, the strata including a lower-cost practitioner stratum and higher-cost practitioner stratum; listing the services associated with the medical practitioners for the selected episodes of care in each stratum with a service value being included with each of the services; comparing the service values of the preserved services within the lower-cost practitioner stratum to the service values of corresponding preserved services within the higher-cost practitioner stratum; and identifying the services which are cost drivers associated with the selected episodes of care that are at least partially responsible for differences in cost of the selected episodes of care between the lower-cost and higher-cost practitioner strata, the identification being performed by the computer and based on the step of comparing the preserved selected service values.