Healthcare Blogger Survey

Do you want some hard data concerning healthcare bloggers? For instance, you may want to know the profession of most healthcare bloggers. You may wonder whether or not healthcare bloggers trust other healthcare bloggers. Finally, one may be curious as to the age, sex, and race of a typical healthcare blogger. If you want answers…

Peru Earthquake

Yesterday afternoon at 6:40 pm local time, Perú experienced a devastating earthquake. According to the Peruvian newspaper El Comercio: Al menos 437 muertos y 80 mil damnificados dejó el terremoto Así lo dijo el director regional de Operaciones del Indeci, Arístides Mussio, tras el sismo de 7,9 grados Richter que remeció el país el miércoles.…

How should clinics schedule appointments?

This questions seems very straightforward theoretically. If each appointment takes 20 minutes, then one should schedule patients at 8, 8:20 8:40, 9, etc. The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy! – Robert Burns In reality, however, this scheduling plan rarely…

P4P data sources

Many times on this blog, I have commented about pay-for-performance (P4P) programs. A healthcare economist, physician, or health services researcher may wonder where they can get data regarding P4P. In truth, getting P4P data is difficult; this is reinforced by the fact that for most physicians, P4P incentives make up a small portion of their…

More Evidence Google is trying to rule the world

The Marshable Social Networking news site reported yesterday (“Google Health…“) that Google is developing a program which will store individual health information.  This is an area of significant need since a vast majority of physicians don’t have electronic records.  The article states: “Codenamed ‘Weaver,’ the upcoming project will be a health information storage program. With…

Metrics for Vaccination Rates

What is a good metric to measure if a doctor is adequately vaccinating their patients? For instance, is the pediatrician Dr. Smith doing an adequate job of giving his patients flu shots? One of the easiest, and most common metrics used is simply the vaccination rate. Vaccination rate = (nbr of patients vaccinated)/(total nbr of…

Advice for Economics Grad Students

Greg Mankiw has a great post on Advice for Grad Students, with links to advice given by David Romer, Hal Varian, David Laibson and more.  Cochrane’s “Writing Tips for PhD students” is especially helpful for graduate students who are attempting to write scholarly articles.

Drugs, Drugs and more Drugs

“Why is there so much controversy about drug testing? I know plenty of guys who would be willing to test any drug they could come up with”– George Carlin The New York Times published two articles this week about prescription drugs. The first deals with generic drugs (“More Generics Slow Rise in Drug Prices“); the…

Do Americans kids know anything about economics?

In 2006, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) conducted its periodic assessment of the quality of American high school students. What is unique about the 2006 “Nation’s Report Card” was that it was the first time that high school students were tested regarding the subject of economics. How did they do? Well, it depends…