Testing procedures for multilevel models with administrative data

Recent Relative Effectiveness studies of the Health Sector have strongly criticized hierarchical ranking in hospitals. As an alternative, they propose a multifaceted approach which evaluates the quality and characteristics of Hospital services. In this direction, the use of administrative data has proven highly useful. This data is less precise than clinical data but performs more effectively in describing general situations. The numerosity of the population renders all the parameters significant in linear model tests. We must therefore utilize resampling schemes in order to verify the hypotheses concerning the significance of the parameters in opportunely drawn subsamples