How are rates adjusted?
Rates were adjusted to the age, sex and race distribution of the national Medicare population. First, the national event rate for each age-sex-race category was computed. These rates were then applied to the HSA population to produce the expected number of events in the HSA, that is, the number of events that would have occurred in the HSA if its rate was the same as the national event rate. It is one way to standardize for different distributions of risk factors across areas.
