Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the question a new paper by Chambers et al. (2025) aims to answer. The authors use data from the Specialty Drug Evidence and Coverage (SPEC) Database, which contains coverage policies related to specialty pharmacy for a large number of US health plans, to examine how n=25 cell and gene therapies are being covered…
That is the title of my Fast Facts presentation at ISPOR Europe at 11:30 GMT on Tuesday, November 11 with Tiago Beck. If you’re in Glasgow next week, feel free to stop by this session. Should be interesting. The abstract is below. As trilogue negotiations on the EU pharmaceutical package progress, stakeholders across the healthcare…
The Times reports that the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is revising it’s approach to how it approves new medicines that treat rare diseases. How? Principally by allowing for single arm trials with real-world ‘digital twin’ controls as well as expediting the approval process. The new plan, which is being launched on…
Special thanks to Joe Paduda to bringing back the best review of health wonkery on the web. Joe writes: Way back in the day Julie Ferguson and I came up with the idea of working with other health care bloggers to publish the best of each every couple of weeks…after a decade-long run we suspended it…
The 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey came out last week. Here are some key findings: Premium costs The average annual premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance in 2025 are $9,325 for single coverage and $26,993 for family coverage. Over the last year, the average single premium increased by 5% and the average family premium increased by…
Generalized risk-adjusted cost effectiveness analysis (GRACE) abandons the assumption of risk neutrality held by traditional cost effectiveness analysis (TCEA). While this sounds like a very technical issue, by allowing for risk aversion over quality of life, GRACE places a relatively higher value on treatments that improve health for more severe diseases and relatively lower value…
How do you write a good grant proposal? How do you write a good proposal for any type of project? Jim Olds– the former head of NSF’s Biological Sciences Directorate –provides some fantastic advice in his post “What Grant Reviewers Actually Look For (and What They Ignore)“. He distills what grant reviewers want into 5…
That is the title of a paper published today in Future Oncology with co-authors Erin Mulvey, Kyi-Sin Than, Sanjana Muthukrishnan, Alex Mutebi, Anindit Chhibber, Anthony Wang, Abualbishr Alshreef, Diala Harb, Victor Gonzalez, Sarah Quinlan, Vardhaman Patel and Patrick Connor Johnson. The study was conducted in collaboration with the Lymphoma Research Foundation. The abstract is below:…
An interesting finding from Liu, Wang, Jin and Lu (2025): While the labor market effects of industrial robots have been extensively studied, their broader health implications, particularly on chronic diseases, remain unexplored. This study fills this gap by linking China’s national-industry robot adoption data to individual health records from the China Health and Nutrition Survey…
UK to pay more for pharmaceuticals? Prior distributions for regression coefficients. What is the “Rural Health Fund” Pedestrian deaths in the US (Part 1, 2) US physicians in private practice dropped from 60.1% (2012) to 42.2% (2024).