Richard's Blog

 Posts Tagged ‘Data analysis’

I read an interesting blog post on FanGraphs attempting to quantify the potential benefit of Yankees Manager Joe Girardi pinchrunning Freddy Guzman for Alex Rodriquez in the 9th inning of a baseball game (excerpted below)

Now, we have to eliminate all the plays where speed won’t really matter – either runner could easily score on a ball that gets to the wall, given that they’d be running on contact with two outs. Neither runner likely scores on a blooper down the line that just finds the chalk or a ground ball past the first baseman that hooks into the corner. The ball has to get past the outfielders for there to be a play at the plate, but not so far past them that they couldn’t get it back in fast enough to make it close at home.
So now we’re talking about a fraction of those one in twenty odds. The real odds of that one specific play happening? One in 50? One in 75? It’s somewhere in there.

I must admit that I find those type of mathematical analyses more interesting that most. But the reason for this post is not to disseminate information about Yankee pinchrunning decisions. And its not to just mention baseball in a Therap blog post- as Justin has not tagged the Mets since June 9.

I started thinking about how much essentially free societal statistical analyses and resources are employed analyzing baseball decisions when compared with equivalent analyses regarding providing services to people with developmental disabilities. Obviously if a baseball fan blogs about a decision it doesn’t really help one team or the other gain an advantage – as the information is available to the public and both teams. But it can help provide better information to both teams.

Many other industries are using predictive markets or monitoring twitter to help in decisions.

To what extent is this happening with services and supports to people with developmental disabilities.
I did some google searches and came up with the following results

Baseball strategy blogs – 13,400,000 responses
Electronic Signature Blogs 1,060,000 responses
Baseball blogs – 53,400,000
Developmental Disability Blogs 323,000

Obviously if there really were 323,000 interesting blogs with analysis of services, supports, management issues, family issues and other topics regarding and analyzing developmental disability that would be more than enough to create some additional useful ideas – that could be implemented by more people than just say Joe Girardi deciding not to pinch-run for Alex Rodriquez in the future.
Keep in mind that many google searches return results like this for Missouri developmental disabilities electronic signature blogs – meaning the google search really is just combining the keywords and really has to do with other issues.

Missouri School of Journalism: Seven to Receive the Prestigious …
Aug 4, 2009 … The Missouri School of Journalism has awarded the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished … history and overcoming developmental disabilities. … which recognizes outstanding achievements in electronic journalism. … sports, technology and other subjects with signature wit and irreverence. …
www.journalism.missouri.edu/news/…/08-04-honor-medals.html – Cached – Similar

And that was about the 2nd item on the list.

But if blogs and other websites are replacing old fashioned journalism – as people like Jeff Jarvis are saying – then where are the investigative reports on how various states are dealing with electronic signatures with regard to provision of service to people with developmental disabilities. Many states have increased their analyses of records through some sort of Medicaid Inspector General or other audit procedure. States require forms to be signed contemporaneously with services in many cases. With wet ink signatures there are limits to certain audit trails. How are agencies – both governmental and private provider – balancing the tradeoffs and benefits between wet-ink and electronic documentation.
If there are lots of books and blogs about whether to walk a batter in the 9th inning of a tie game- why is there such limited analysis of signature signoffs in an industry that spends perhaps $60 billion in federal and state money annually. What sort of analysis has been done regarding how much time people spend driving paper around. Could you imagine if people – in their recreational free time and being aware of HIPAA and PHI and sensitive to agency confidentiality and other concerns –commented on how much time they spend driving paper around – and how with better or different procedures they could have saved time to spend with the people they support – or saved overtime dollars or saved gasoline.

Where I live in New York City- its very hard to get fields for youth soccer and other sports. Virtually any decent field needs a permit.

The big weekend soccer league is West Side Soccer League (which actually has players from all over Manhattan – not just the West Side). And games are played at numerous fields on the west side, central park and even Randall’s Island which is about 30 minutes or so from the West Side.

My daughters are on a team which as of the end of October will have played one game (which one daughter missed due to a fever).

They have had 4 scheduled games and 3 of them were rained out. This is because they are scheduled to play on North Meadow in Central Park on what is considered one of the nicest, newest grass fields (not compared to suburban fields – but its grass and this is New York City) – so the threshold for canceling a game seems like any water.

The game canceled yesterday was from Saturdays rain and Sunday was one of the nicest games of the year. From the league website:

Some good soccer this weekend, just not on North Meadow.
Sorry to the kids who were unable to play.
Hoping for sun for the rest of the season

There are other fields played on Turf which never get canceled. When my son played soccer -I remember reffing games when the weather was 40 degreees and windy and rain. But they didn’t care about the field – so the game could be played.

I asked the league commissioner if anyone had done any data analysis of what fields have gotten rained out historically – to see if they should be rotating teams between fields rather than scheduling each team on only one field for the entire season.

They said they hadn’t looked at this data.

My point isn’t that whether or not a soccer game is played or not is so important – but what continually strikes me is the lack of data and quantitative analysis going into everyday decisions. People are conditioned in many cases to not think quantitatively and analytically in making decisions.

I wonder as we move forward – and have data like that is available from Therap and other systems in other parts of life- when will data analysis become a more accepted part of all decision making and discussions.