Friday Links
Medicare (Part C) for all. Pentagon suspends mental health referrals for DoD civilians. ACA’s impact on marriage. How Google Scholar alters academic citations. EORTC QLU‐C10D.
Academic Health Economist’s Blog: Journal Round Up
I hosted this week’s Academic Health Economist (AHE) blog journal round-up. Below is one of the papers reviewed, but do check-out the full article here. Price effects of a hospital merger: heterogeneity across health insurers, hospital products, and hospital locations. Health Economics [PubMed] [RePEc] Published 1st July 2019Most economics literature indicates that hospital mergers typically result…
Nursing homes are closing. What should we do?
An interesting article on the Marketplace Morning Report last week dives into the topic. Hundreds of nursing homes around the country have shut down leaving states to deal with what to do with people who need long term care…In Massachusetts, lawmakers have extended a $50 million lifeline to keep some nursing homes open. One nursing…
End of week links
Incentivizing organ donation. Are value assessments ready for prime time? AAP: ‘Don’t microwave plastics’ Pharmacists and value-based care. Can Medicaid expansions prevent housing evictions? How does gentrification affect the health of low-income children?
Conveying Value of Accelerated Approval Drugs May Be Challenge for Pharma Firms
That is the title of an article in Spotlight on Market Access published by MMIT Radar. The article examines how FDA decisions to expedite getting treatments to market will be received by payers. The Healthcare Economist is quoted extensively in the article: Payers have two key concerns, maintains Jason Shafrin, Ph.D., senior director of policy…
Physician perceptions of the ACA
What do physicians thing about the ACA? How have these opinions changed over time? These are the questions that a paper by Riordan et al. (2019) in Health Affairs. The authors surveyed physiicans in both 2012 and 2017 and found that the share of physicians who thought the ACA was good for health care increased…
Polio eradicated in Africa?
Some positive news as reported in The Economist: On August 21st Nigeria marked three years since its last documented case of wild polio. That means the country is set to be declared polio-free by the World Health Organisation-backed Global Polio Eradication Initiative. If that happens, probably next year, all of Africa will be officially free…
Labor Day Special: Does vacation improve your well-being?
According to a paper by Bloom et al. (2010), the answer is ‘yes’…at least in the short run. The authors studied 96 workers from the Netherlands and asked these individuals about their well-being two weeks before their vacation, during their vacation and 1, 2 and 4 weeks after their vacation. Wellbeing was measured based on…
Why don’t physicians follow evidence-based guidelines more often?
Many researchers complain that physicians often use treatments with little evidence to base these decisions. From off-label prescribing, to unstudied surgical procedures, physicians are often painted as cavalier practitioners who don’t read studies. For instance, Austin Frakt at Incidental Economist writes: The British Medical Journal sifted through the evidence for thousands of medical treatments to assess…
Where is digital health taking off?
Where is digital health taking off? One way to answer this question is to look to see where research is currently being conducted to determine where innovation is most likely in the future. The American Medical Association (AMA) summarizes the Chen et al. (2019) paper in JAMA that looks at the number of government-registered digital…