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What can we learn about nursing and AI from The Pitt. FDA expediting first-in-human trials? IIA. Measles back in SF. US fertility at all-time low.
Impact of Continuous Glucose Monitoring on Clinical Outcomes and Productivity Losses Among People Living With Type 2 Diabetes Not Using Insulin From an Employer’s Perspective
That is the title of a new paper out yesterday in the Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology from my FTI colleague Marie Steele-Adjognon, along with Martha E. Shepherd, Jon Harris-Shapiro, David Hines, Abraham Lee and Yeesha Poon. The abstract is below. Background: This study evaluated the impact of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) on health…
Two visions for value – Why GCEA and HEMA clash on drug pricing
That is the title of my latest Perspectives from the Healthcare Economist article published in The Evidence Base this week. Here is the teaser: In this guest column, healthcare economist Jason Shafrin (FTI Consulting and Mann School of Pharmacy, University of Southern California) explores a widening divide over how health systems define value, and what that means…
Why your measurement of medication adherence may be flawed
Proportion of days covered (PDC) is the most widely endorsed measure of medication adherence. For instance, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) uses PDC as its preferred adherence measure for its Quality Rating System for many chronic conditions (e.g., hypertension, diabetes, and hyperlipidemia). However, your PDC measure may be flawed depending on what…
Quantifying the Lifetime Economic Impact of Pediatric Oral Nutritional Supplements
That is the title of a new paper published this week in Clinical Nutrition with co-authors Kyi-Sin Than, Khounish Sharma, Kirk W. Kerr, and Dhanasekhar Kesavelu. The abstract is below: IntroductionPediatric malnutrition is a significant global public health challenge, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. This study quantifies the lifetime, per-person economic impact of pediatric…
Life expectancy in Panama is better than in the US
I am traveling to Panamá this Friday. Here are some interesting facts about the country’s health care system. Life expectancy is better than the U.S. Life expectancy in Panamá is 79.59 compared to 79.30 in the U.S. Mix of public and private health insurance. Panama’s healthcare architecture rests on two distinct public pillars. The Caja de…
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Role of health care in the 2026 election. Where does economics fall in terms of study reproducibility? COVID-19’s “cicada” variant is spreading Best practices for transparent reporting for group based trajectory models. What is “learned helplessness”?
What has been the main impact of MFN?
It is not bringing down US prices, but delaying launches in Europe. Reuters reports: Drug launches in EU markets fell by some 35% in the 10 months since Trump’s executive order, compared with the previous 10 months…Delaying launches at lower EU prices could help secure higher U.S. prices for longer. You can read the full…
How did China become a global leader in life sciences?
An NBER working paper by Barwick, Xia and Xia (2026) provides the answer: In 2010, China accounted for less than 8% of global clinical trials; by 2020, it had surpassed the US in annual registered clinical trial volume…We provide strong evidence that China’s rise was primarily driven by the National Reimbursement Drug List (NRDL) reform,…
With AI, why do we still have radiologists?
From Lex Fridman’s interview with Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA: …the first job that computer scientists said, AI researchers said was gonna go away was radiology because computer vision was going to achieve superhuman levels…and it did. Computer vision was superhuman in 2019….maybe a little bit later, 2020. And so it’s been a long time…