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Article Critique

Student’s Name

Institutional Affiliation
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Article Critique

Estes, J., Nguyen, D., Chen, Y., Dalrymple, L., Rhee, C., Kalantar‐Zadeh, K., & Şentürk, D.

(2018). Time‐dynamic profiling with application to hospital readmission among patients on

dialysis. Biometrics, 74(4), 1383-1394. https://doi.org/10.1111/biom.12908

The research study by Estes et al. (2018) assesses dialysis facilities for patient

outcomes that vary with time. The researchers develop a method for monitoring patient outcomes

for a population of end-stage renal disease patients continuously over time. Their aim was to use

this standard profiling analysis method to estimate the time-varying readmission rate for all

hospitals that offer dialysis services in the united states. This research allows an evaluation of the

performance of dialysis facilities with respect to different patient outcomes and the time that the

patient is on dialysis.

This is a longitudinal study that used non-probability sampling to identify the

subjects. The participants were dialysis patients, 18 years and above, who had started dialysis

between the first day of 2006 and the last day of 2009. The researchers only used patients who

use Medicare as their primary payer, which yielded 148,259 patients (Estes et al., 2018). Some

facilities were excluded if they did not have more than 20 patients or if they did not have

adequate follow-up data which was defined as more than 10 discharges. The final study cohort

comprised of 113,764 dialysis care patients spread over 2,896 hospitals (Estes et al., 2018).

Non-probability sampling methods are a practical and more appropriate technique

for researchers to investigate certain phenomena in the real world. It has a major advantage over

probability sampling in that it is both cost-effective and time-effective. It is also an easy

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technique for sampling and can be used in situations where it is not possible to use probability

sampling such as when the population is very small. It is an appropriate sampling technique for

researchers since data collection costs have risen dramatically in recent years (Wiśniowski et al.,

2020).
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References

Estes, J., Nguyen, D., Chen, Y., Dalrymple, L., Rhee, C., Kalantar ‐Zadeh, K., & Şentürk, D.

(2018). Time‐dynamic profiling with application to hospital readmission among

patients on dialysis. Biometrics, 74(4), 1383-1394. https://doi.org/10.1111/biom.12908

Wiśniowski, A., Sakshaug, J., Perez Ruiz, D., & Blom, A. (2020). Integrating Probability and

Nonprobability Samples for Survey Inference. Journal Of Survey Statistics And

Methodology, 8(1), 120-147. https://doi.org/10.1093/jssam/smz051