[_zbap]

Ah, I see, and take your point. I should have worked on a more reader-friendly version of this graph so I just assume people don't understand its bizarre nature. But, my work had been done many years ago with the investigation.

Here's the part that stood way out even with that unsophisticated graph: the flat land between various prescription codes. It's just there. It draws the eye and makes you ask questions, which is what we did. Another dimension not pictured there is distribution of doctors vs prescriptions. Theirs stood out on that too.

Even in their busiest years, they didn't treat any common ailments with any degree of distributed variety. By contrast, rest of the clinics did business as usual: whoever walked through their door got treated for whatever random thing they had.

[thaumasiotes]

Just based on eyeballing the graph, I'd say there's a cultural element to what codes get used, because individual clinics often show more or less activity at a particular code for all six years. Choosing a code is something of a gray area, so that's not necessarily malicious, but I think "whoever walked through their door got treated for whatever random thing they had" is slightly oversimplified -- the patients will have been treated appropriately, but local culture will have pulled them into being coded in certain ways over other, arguably equally-applicable ways.

(Clinics having their own "personality" in coding could also be explained by the clinics having locally well-recognized specialties. That's hard to evaluate without knowing which codes are which.)