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Harvard Professor Alan Zaslavsky Visits the ABS

Professor Alan Zaslavsky, an expert in health care policy and statistics, recently visited the ABS in conjunction with his trip to deliver the E.K Foreman Lecture at the Australian Statistics Conference (ASC) held in Perth last December 6-10.

Professor Zaslavsky is Professor of Health Care Policy (Statistics) in the Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School. His statistical research interests include surveys, census methodology, small-area estimation, official statistics, missing data, hierarchical modelling, and applied Bayesian methodology. He is a member of the Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) of the National Academy of Sciences and has served on CNSTAT panels on census methodology, small area estimation and race/ethnicity measurement, as well as several Institute of Medicine committees on measurement and reporting of health and of health care quality. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and a National Associate of the National Academy of Sciences.

At the ASC, Professor Zaslavsky was the keynote speaker, giving the biennial E. K. Foreman lecture on "Using Hierarchical Models to Attribute Sources of Variation in Consumer Assessments of Health Care"

When he visited the ABS, Professor Zaslavsky gave a lecture on the above topic and also presented several well attended sessions, including on missing data; modelling cost and expenditure data; recent research in the analysis of inexactly linked data; and diagnosing imputation models by applying target analyses under posterior replications of observed data.

During the week-long visit to ABS, Professor Zaslavsky and a good number of ABS methodologists and analysts spent time discussing methodological issues. The ABS also invited analysts and modellers from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) and the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM) to discuss with Professor Zaslavsky, particularly on health data analysis, modelling and microsimulation studies.

For more information about Professor Zaslavsky's visit to the ABS, the E. K. Foreman lecture or any of the sessions Alan presented at the ABS, please contact Shaun McNaughton on (02) 6252 5125 or shaun.mcnaughton@abs.gov.au.