Characterizing Physician Referral Networks with Ricci Curvature

In the rapidly evolving field of healthcare management, the analysis of medical claims data has become an essential component for improving the quality and equity of healthcare services. The nature of care delivery in the United states is heavily influenced by its fragmentation--care is often spread across multiple disconnected providers (e.g., primary-care physicians, specialists). Settings with greater care fragmentation have been shown to inhibit effective communication and coordination between care team members, thus contributing to higher costs and lower quality of treatment [13,33,21,1,7]. Despite the well-understood impacts of fragmentation, there are still few quantitative tools that can capture the mechanisms of care delivery networks at scale [14]. Standard analyses of local infrastructure features, often executed using tabular data, are limited in their ability to distill complex dynamics between physicians.