Package Overview

This R package enables users to:

• Simulate baseline co-occurring health conditions for a user-defined number of individuals
• Upcode specific health conditions to a user-specified degree over a set of time points, including optional additional right censoring
• Undercode the simulated individuals to a user-specified degree

Overall, these functions help users to better and more reproducibly evaluate approaches for upcoding and/or undercoding analysis and monitoring relevant to Medicare. As one example, see [add link to paper here when available].

For more details about the background relevant to each of these, see “Brief background” below.

Installation

You can install the development version of upcoding from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("StanfordHPDS/upcoding")

Example tutorial

Setup

library(upcoding)
library(here)
library(tidyverse)
library(data.table)
library(survival)
library(tidycmprsk)
library(ggsurvfit)

Simulate baseline data

As an illustrative example, we simulate baseline data using default settings for 100 people (e.g. rows). Each row of the simulated data represents a person (indexed by the person_id column) and each column represents a diagnosis. More specifically, each column corresponds to one of the 115 Hierarchical Condition Categories (HCCs) in version 28 (v28) of the CMS-HCC risk adjustment formula, which is used in Medicare Advantage. You can read more about the basics of risk adjustment here and here.

By default, simulate_baseline_v28_hcc_dt() creates a directory in your current working directory (e.g. here::here()). We temporarily create an output directory “temp” relative to the current working directory to save our output. We’ll also generate two different baseline data sets– one for upcoding and one for undercoding. Don’t forget to change the seed to get different results!

Note. Users will likely want to simulate more people (e.g. rows) in practice.

# This uses the default seed, which is 123
simulate_baseline_v28_hcc_dt(
  num_people = 100,
  out_dir = "temp",
  out_file_prefix = "upcoding_baseline_data"
)

simulate_baseline_v28_hcc_dt(
  num_people = 100,
  out_dir = "temp",
  out_file_prefix = "undercoding_baseline_data",
  curr_seed = 999
)

Read in generated files:

undercoding_baseline_data <- fread(here("temp/undercoding_baseline_data.csv"))
upcoding_baseline_data <- fread(here("temp/upcoding_baseline_data.csv"))

# We expect 100 rows (for 100 simulated people),
# and 116 columns (for one person_id column and 115 HCCs)
dim(undercoding_baseline_data)
#> [1] 100 116

Undercoding

The baseline data generated is meant to simulate co-occurring health conditions free of coding incentives. However, it might be informative to instead generate data like closer to that of Traditional Medicare (TM), which is known to have undercoding of diagnoses (one recent paper about this here). If we want to simulate TM-like data, we might want to undercode (e.g. randomly remove diagnoses) from our baseline data. This function removes a user-specified proportion of diagnoses across the entire data set, and writes the undercoded data set to file (with default file prefix undercoded_data_*).

undercode_dt(undercoding_baseline_data,
  undercoding_prop = 0.2, # undercode 20% of existing diagnoses
  out_dir = "temp"
)

Upcoding

Specify which diagnoses to upcode and to what degree

The main upcoding function, upcode_all_hccs() expects as input a tibble or data.frame specifying the following:

• “hcc” (character vector): Which individual HCCs to upcode, identified as “hcc1”, “hcc2”, etc.
• “approach” (character vector): How to select people (e.g. rows) to upcode. For each HCC, this should be either “any” or “lower severity”. “any” means that any rows not previously coded for that HCC will be considered as available for upcoding, and “lower severity” will only upcode rows where a lower severity HCC was previously coded (if that’s available).
• “upcoding_prop” (numeric vector): The proportion of available rows to upcode (needs to be a value greater than 0 and less than 1)

# Specification input
hcc <- c("hcc35", "hcc2")
approach <- c("any", "any") # What approach to use to select
upcoding_prop <- c(0.5, 0.5) # Degree of upcoding overall

# Put columns together in a tibble
my_upcoding_spec_df <- tibble(
  hcc,
  approach,
  upcoding_prop
)

Now we’re set to upcode the speficied HCCs! Note. By default, this will upcode over 4 time points (row IDs to upcode are split randomly across time points) and will also additionally right censor 5% of rows across the same time points (representing loss to follow up). This loss to follow up is also split randomly across the number of time points you specify, and once someone is lost to follow up they can’t be coded for any HCCs afterwards. You can adjust these with the num_timepoints and censoring_prop parameters respectively; see documentation for details.

upcode_all_hccs(
  upcoding_baseline_data,
  my_upcoding_spec_df,
  out_dir = "temp"
)

We have the option to either read in the final upcoded dataset (default name: all_hcc_upcoded_data.csv) or read in events by HCC (default name: [hcc_name]_upcoded_data_event_and_time_labels.csv). all_hcc_upcoded_data.csv corresponds to the final upcoded and censored data at the end of all time points.

Let’s look at the latter (e.g. [hcc_name]_upcoded_data_event_and_time_labels.csv), as this is the format compatible with standard survival packages with R (so we assume it’ll be used more):

# Read in events (upcoding or censoring) for HCC 2
hcc2_labels <- read_csv(here("temp/hcc2_upcoded_data_event_and_time_labels.csv"))

head(hcc2_labels)
#> # A tibble: 6 × 3
#>   person_id event_type event_time
#>       <dbl>      <dbl>      <dbl>
#> 1        62          1          1
#> 2        80          1          1
#> 3        21          1          1
#> 4         7          1          1
#> 5        95          1          1
#> 6        53          1          1

Let’s plot it! We’re interested in the incidence of new coding, so a cumulative incidence plot makes sense as a starting point.

my_plot <- cuminc(Surv(event_time, factor(event_type)) ~ 1, data = hcc2_labels) |>
  ggcuminc() |>
  scale_ggsurvfit()

my_plot

Lastly, you might want to delete the temporary directory we made for this tutorial:

unlink(here("temp/"), recursive = TRUE)