Friday Links
ACA: In peril with Ginsburg’s seat in play RCT: App to help you quit smoking DCE: Framing bias? pCODR: Do they care about patient advocate input? CRFB: On the fiscal impact of the Biden health plan
Steps Health Professionals Can Take to Reduce Inequality in Health Outcomes
That is the title of an article in AJMC co-authored with Meena Venkatachalam. An excerpt is below: While decision-makers traditionally have ignored the issue of inequality, academic researchers have already developed tools to quantify a treatment’s value from reductions in inequality. Two common methods for doing so are distributional cost effectiveness analysis (DCEA) and multiple-criteria…
On technology and medicine
From George Gubernikoff in JAMA Cardiology in a piece titled “The Great Technological Divide“: All too frequently as rounds are made in the hospital, physicians jockey for access to computer terminals. Hours spent entering information in required fields leave little time to enter a patient room and engage in conversation let alone perform a physical…
Alternative payment models and innovation
I’m very excited to announce that the study: “Alternative payment models and innovation: A case study of US health system adoption of a sacubitril/valsartan to treat acute decompensated heart failure” has been published in the Journal of Medical Economics last week. Co-authors on the paper are Elmar R. Aliyev, Michelle Brauer, Siyeon Park and Xian…
Links
Mathematical vs. conceptual simplicity. “Hell has frozen over” Former FDA Commissioners on EUA for COVID vaccine Drug imports from Canada coming? ED wait times during COVID. COVID money tracker.
Network meta-analysis of sickle cell disease treatments
“Crizanlizumab and comparators for adults with sickle cell disease: a systematic review and network meta-analysis” is the title of a paper recently published in BMJ Open with co-authors Howard Thom, Jeroen Jansen, Lauren Zhao, George Joseph, Hung-Yuan Cheng, Subhajit Gupta, and Nirmish Shah. The abstract is below. Objectives Treatment options for preventing vaso-occlusive crises (VOC) among…
How to justify your survival curve extrapolation methodology
Clinical trials are typically of (relatively) short duration, but innovative treatments may impact patient survival over multiple years. Health economists and outcomes researchers often are faced with the challenge of extrapolating clinical trial survival curves to estimate long-term survival gains for the typical patient. These estimates may be done parameterically (e.g., exponential, Weibull, Gompertz, log-logistic,…
Payer use of ICER reports
The Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy (AMCP) held an interesting webinar titled “5 Years of ICER – Insights and Impact on Payers“. Some highlights form the presentation. Most relevant information Jeremy Lee from MedImpact–a pharmacy benefits manager (PBM)–noted that their Pharmacy and Therapeutics (P&T) committee used four key pieces of evidence when making coverage and…
Disease control and inequality reduction
Bütikofer and Salvanes (2020) in The Review of Economic Studies: This article examines the economic impact of a tuberculosis control program launched in Norway in 1948. In the 1940s, Norway had one of the highest tuberculosis infection rates in Europe, affecting about 85% of the inhabitants. To lower the disease burden, the Norwegian government launched…
Operation Warp Speed: Where are we now?
STAT News has an excellent article evaluating where we are on the federal initiative to fast track the development of treatments and vaccines for COVID-19. To date, the fastest a vaccine was ever developed was four years. Operation Warp Speed, or OWS, has already spent about $10 billion to help vaccine makers develop their candidates…