Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Medicare has adopted a system where hospitals that have large number of unplanned readmissions are penalized through lower compensation. Previously, hospitals made more money when patients were re-admitted; now, these incentives are reduced although not completely eliminated. Stuart Butler at The Health Care Blog has an interesting idea: apply a similar approach to prisons. …
Does health insurance improve health? Slow life. Donald Trump = Genius? Improving cancer detection? Nobody in China wants to be a doctor Physician daily bag.
An concise article from Sean Khozin and Gideon Blumenthal (2015) try to explain. “Personalized (or precision) medicine has been broadly described as the administration of the right therapy to the right patient at the right dose and intensity.” However, this is a fairly broad definition. Some more concrete examples of personalized medicine include: Modern concepts in…
The health care industry should take into account outcomes when weighing the cost of new treatments and technologies and make quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) part of the equation, say the authors of a study in the April issue of Health Affairs. This is the begining of an article in Managed Care Magazine that reviews a…
Interesting comments from Mitzi Wasik, PharmD, BCPS, director of Pharmacy Medicare Programs at Aetna. HT: AJMC.
Vergon 6 was once filled with the super-dense substance known as dark matter, each pound of which weighs over ten thousand pounds. The Professor, Futurama, S1E4. On that light-hearted note, enjoy your weekend!
Almost ten years ago, I wrote a post on Iran’s policy of paying organ donors. It looks like the New York Times has finally caught on. An excerpt is below: But [Iran’s organ donation program’s] chief advantage is this: People who need kidneys get them rapidly, rather than die on the waiting list. In the vast majority of cases,…
The Healthcare Economist is on vacation for the next week, but I leave you with these posts to tide you over until my return. First 3D-printed drug. A cancer report card. Will software eat healthcare? Machine learning and brain injury Profile of super-utilizers.
That is the conclusion reached by John Holahan and Stacey McMorrow in a RWJ Issue Brief. They claim that “recent reports suggest such growth has returned to a more typical level of approximately 5.6 percent in 2014, considerably faster than increases in gross domestic product (GDP).” Positive excess cost growth–defined as the difference between the…
Great news has come out in the fight against Ebola. A vaccine against Ebola has been shown to highly effective in trials conducted during the Ebola outbreak in Guinea. In fact, some news sources claim that the vaccine is 100% effective. Is the vaccine truly 100% effective? Likely no. In the original study in the…