Cavalcade of Risk: Biff! Bang! Pow! Edition
The latest edition of the Cavalcade of Risk is up at Insurance Writer.
Month: August 2010
Mid-Week Links
Cost of Medical Errors: $19.8 billion. Betting on your grades. One weight loss method. Back pain: whether to use hot or cold packs. Healthcare.gov (and parody)
Income and Long Term Care
Almost 7 out of every 10 of individuals living to age 65 will require some long-term care (LTC) assistance. Of these, over one-third will spend some time in a nursing home. In general, however, the elderly strongly prefer home based LTC if possible. “Mattimore and colleagues (1997) found that 30% of elderly survey respondents would…
Patient Heterogeneity and Comparative Effectiveness Research
According to Kathleen Lohr, the most pressing issues for comparative effectiveness research (CER) include: 1) how to conduct CER for heterogeneous patient populations and 2) ways to implement longitudinal investigations to capture long-term health outcomes. Today I will focus on measuring patient heterogeneity. Although it makes sense to take into account differences across patients, measuring…
Three weekend links
Cutting Back on Doctor’s Visits. Obama = Bush. Libertarian Bioethics?
Trends in Employer-Provided Benefits
PricewaterhouseCoopers recently conducted a survey of about 700 companies to determine the latest trends in employer-provided benefits. The survey, conducted in early 2010, assessed the level of health insurance, retirement, and other benefits provided by firms from over 30 industries. Today, I will focus on the results with respect to the health insurance. Broadly, PPOs…
Health Wonk Review
The latest edition of the health wonk review is up at the Disease Management Care Blog. It even has an air travel theme for the jet setters among us.
Three Tiers of Accountable Care Organizations
The Healthcare Economist has previously reviewed different forms of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). Implementing ACOs in practice, however, may prove more difficult. How could the government or private insurers incentivize providers to provide integrated care? How can they incentivize providers do perform fewer services and, thus, make less money? An article by Shortell and Casalino…
Statistical Power
What is power? Merriam Webster defines power as the “possession of control, authority, or influence over others.” The power I will talk about today, however, is statistical power. Statistical power measures the ability of a statistical test to determine whether the null hypothesis is false. For instance, in the U.S. judicial system, the null hypothesis…
No Wrong Door
In Virginia, there are over one million people age 60 and older and over 90,000 Virginians age 85 and older. These figures will only grow in the upcoming decades. Thus will put increasing strain on public programs and will require service providers to reorient medical care toward providing continued, high-quality long term care services. Long…