Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
COVID-19 has had a disastrous effect on the economy. While some portion of the economic effect is people becoming ill, much of the effect is due to individuals changing behavior to avoid contracting the disease. For instance, people are much less likely to go shopping, eat at restaurants, and travel. These latter effects are termed…
Understanding trends in COVID-19 transmission rates is vital both public health monitoring and policymaking decisions. However, diagnostic capacity may be limited, and test sampling is often non-random, and often COVID-19 cases are not reported when patients have mild or asymptomatic disease. What is the solution? A paper in Nature Biotechnology argues that wastewater testing may…
That is the basic question that Reed et al. (2020) attempt to answer in their recent paper. The approach they use is as follows: We designed a discrete-choice experiment to administer 10 choice questions to each respondent representing experimentally controlled pairs of scenarios defined by when nonessential businesses could reopen (May, July, or October 2020),…
Who gets the vaccine first? Amazon Pharmacy. What’s different now? Interoperability and the pandemic. Becoming homebound. COVID-19’s impact on clinical trials and HTA evaluation.
How well do different countries take care of their elderly and near elderly populations? A study by Macinko et al. (2020) provides some useful statistics. Methods Population of interest. Individuals aged 50 and above sampled across 23 high- and middle-income countries. Data. The data come from 2015 or 2016 years for the following data sets:…
Looks like more good news on the COVID-19 vaccine front. Dr. Fauci’s prediction that the Pfizer/BioNTech foreshadowed positive news for future vaccines appears to have come true. Stat News reports: The Moderna vaccine reduced the risk of Covid-19 infection by 94.5%. There were 95 cases of infection among patients who received placebo in the company’s…
Tomorrow, Monday, November 16 at 15:00 CET (9:00 EST/6:00 PST), I will be on an ISPOR Europe Panel titled “Will COVID-19 Accelerate the Adoption of Digital Health Technologies? Perspectives on Evaluating Digital Health Technologies during Global Disease Outbreaks“. The session will be moderated by Kristian Kidholm, PhD of the University of Southern Denmark, and my…
US debt rises about 100% of GDP. Racism and sickle cell disease. Health insurance among the self-employed. The interaction of minimum drinking age laws and genetics on binge drinking. Sanctuary policies and crime. Does social care prevent healthcare utilization? HDHPs impact the extensive but not intensive margins. DITF .Impact of SES on knee pain.
Interesting findings from an NBER working paper by Cronin and Evans (2020): Higher-quality nursing homes, as measured by inspection ratings, have substantially lower COVID-19 mortality. Quality does not predict the ability to prevent any COVID-19 resident or staff cases, but higher-quality establishments prevent the spread of resident infections conditional on having one. Preventing COVID-19 cases…