David Zatara
Public Data Analyst
Flagstaff, Arizona
There's always a number everyone quotes and nobody checks. I find it, pull the data underneath it, and see if it actually holds up. Where the data points to something worth fixing, I build it.
Latest research · Working Paper No. 05 · Preprint, not peer-reviewed
Federal auditors checked four states for autism therapy billing. In all four, nearly every claim they sampled had something wrong. The national data shows the same pattern in every state they have not checked yet.
Medicaid ABA spending grew from $448 million to $2.03 billion nationally between 2019 and 2023. Four state audits found the same documentation failures independently. National data shows why: one billing code has held 72 to 77 percent of spending every year, and the growth came from new entrants, not consolidation.
Findings, with the number they compare against
National ABA spending growth, 2019 to 2023
Documents, same fiscal year, three different official totals
Certified hospices with no published quality score (21% of the total)
Unsupported RN hours in one month, about 1 in 20 hours reported, across 40%+ of facilities
Weekend staffing drop vs. the same facility's weekday average
Research notes
- When billing blames scheduling and both are right
When billing blames scheduling and scheduling blames billing, both are usually right. The failure is in the handoff, which nobody is measured on.
Nov 12, 2024 - Half your performance gap might just be a denominator
Sometimes two teams look like they are performing differently, but the gap disappears when you check whether they are counting the same thing. They usually are not.
Jun 14, 2023 - 92% of nonprofits use AI. Of those, 7% say it made a difference
Adoption is near-universal and impact is rare. AI tends to help the people giving instructions, not the people doing the work. And the people doing the work lose skills the longer the tool does it for them.
Jul 25, 2026
Working with me
- When not to hire someone like me
Cross-industry pattern recognition suits a narrow class of problem. For most operational problems, domain depth wins. Being honest about which is which.
Sep 18, 2025 - What a process audit actually involves
A plain description of the first two weeks of an engagement, written because "process audit" means very different things to different people.
Mar 4, 2025