RT Book, Section A1 Howell, Michael D. A1 Stevens, Jennifer P. SR Print(0) ID 1167645351 T1 What Everyone Should Know About Risk Adjustment T2 Understanding Healthcare Delivery Science YR 2020 FD 2020 PB McGraw-Hill Education PP New York, NY SN 9781260026481 LK accesspharmacy.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?aid=1167645351 RD 2024/03/29 AB Risk adjustment in medicine and healthcare is a story of convergent evolution. On one hand, risk adjustment has a history that emerged with the creation of health insurance in the United States in the 20th century. The “risk” is the risk assumed by the insurance company to insure each individual person. In this setting, it represented an estimate of how chronically ill a particular person is, and therefore, how costly that person is to insure.1 On the other hand, similar efforts were underway at the hospital level to create methods to compare one hospital with another; risk adjustment allows comparisons by understanding the variation in the probability of adverse or favorable outcomes based on patient characteristics versus hospital-driven outcomes.