Friday Links
Hollywood explains economics. The science on Ebola. Being mortal. GOP, the Senate and ACA. Recent research on ACOs.
Month: October 2014
Halloween CoR
Head over to Colorado Health Insurance Insider to take a look at the All Treats No Tricks edition of the Cavalcade of Risk.
Quotation of the Day
We adore chaos because we love to produce order. — M.C. Escher.
CEA for EBP
How do you implement a cost effectiveness analysis (CEA) for the implementation of evidence-based practices (EBP)? This is the topic Fortney et al. (2014) address. They review four types of CEAs. Trial based CEA. Relies on traditional randomized controlled trials (RCT). Because RCTs are expensive, they are typically run on a small sample of the…
Friday Links
Ebola vaccines will come too late. Grades for your doc. 15 years for Medicare fraud. Asimov on creativity. Is the scientific method dead? Plus be sure to check out this week’s health wonk review over at Colorado Health Insurance Insider.
Regulatory Tsunami?
Medicare is working hard to make sure that doctors are efficiently providing high-quality care. Programs such as the Physician Quality Reporting System (PRQS) and the Value-Based Payment Modifier all are aimed to improve quality and lower cost. The downside of such programs, however, is that the impose reporting burdens on physicians. For instance, Medicare can…
Wearables
PwC just released a report on wearable technology. Some findings from the health field include: More than 80% of consumers said an important benefit of wearable technology is its potential to make health care more convenient. Consumers have not yet embraced wearable health technology in large numbers, but they’re interested. More than 80 percent of…
The cost of Informal Elder Care
Many adults spend significant time caring for sick, elderly parents. What is the cost of providing this informal care? Would it be better to have family members outsource the care to formal caregivers? A paper by Chari, Engberg, Ray and Mehrotra (2014) attempt to answer this question. They use data from the American Time Use Survey…
Do travel bans work?
According to Vox, the answer is ‘no’. The reason isn’t because travel bans don’t work in theory; it is because in practice travel bans are never perfectly enforceable and thus may cause more harm than they help. But there’s a very clear problem with using a travel ban to stop Ebola: it renders useless the…
Friday Links
The new complex patient. Egg futures. Price transparency. NHS on strike. The HMO backlash. Ebola and airline stock prices. End of the war on drugs?