Logistic regression with random effects

["Hunsicker, Lawrence" <lawrence-hunsicker@uiowa.edu>]

Good morning, all:

I suppose that this must be the thousandth time someone has asked this question, and I apologize that I don’t know how to look up past questions and answers.  I am trying to study whether there is a significant difference in outcomes among centers providing a kind of medical service.  The outcome is binary.  There are a batch of individually varying covariates of importance, but the real focus is on whether, after correcting for these covariates, there is a meaningful variability among centers in outcome.  I am not interested in the specific centers, but rather in the overall distribution of underlying center effect.  It would seem that the appropriate statistical method is logistic regression with a random center effect.  I can do this with Egret, but I am wondering whether it is possible to do this in S-Plus.  In S-Plus we have lme for linear random effects, and we have glm for estimating logistic regression.  But is there something that combines these two?

As always, thanks in advance to anyone that can help me.

Larry Hunsicker