On January 19, 2006, I started blogging with this post. You could say that it was my “Hello World!” post. In ten years, a lot has changed.
On a personal note, I got a PhD at UC-San Diego, began work at Acumen, and have moved on to Precision Health Economics. I moved all around California: from San Diego to San Francisco to Los Angeles. I got married to the most amazing woman in the world and was blessed to have an equally amazing daughter.
As a nation, we’ve seen 10 state of the union addresses (see my comments on each one). The Affordable Care Act passed and dramatically changed the health care landscape (see Obamacare Overview). More people have health insurance, but health care cost per capita continues to rise. Innovation is all around us including in new cancer treatments, digital medicine, robotic surgery, but society increasingly demands that these innovations demonstrate that the health benefits that they provide are worth the cost.
Throughout the past 10 years, I’ve kept you up to date on all these happenings. Some of your favorite posts I have highlighted below. My most popular posts of the last 10 years included:
- The Healthcare Around the World Series. The series covered the healthcare systems of Canada. France, Germany, Greece, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland.
- Health Care System Grudge Match: Canada vs. U.S. This post compared the health care systems in the U.S. and Canada.
- What are Accountable Care Organizations? This is the first post of many (see here) analyzing accountable care organizations.
- What is the difference between DRGs, AP-DRGs, and APR-DRGs? This post describes different approaches for classifying hospital admissions.
- Difference-in-Difference Estimation. A description of the econometric approach known as DiD.
The top post of 2015 was “What is MIPS?” which describes Medicare’s planned Merit-Based Payment Incentive System which will change how physicians are reimbursed by Medicare.
Besides my blog, I’ve published a bunch of articles in peer-reviewed sources as well. Although all these papers focus on health economics, there is a wide variety of topics within this genre. Here is my full list of publications. The most cited ones are:
- Operating on commission: analyzing how physician financial incentives affect surgery rates. Health Economics.
- Geographic variation in spending, utilization and quality: Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries. Institute of Medicine.
- Comparison of pharmacists and primary care providers as immunizers. American Journal of Pharmacy Benefits.
In 2015 I published three new articles as well:
- Regional Growth in Medicare Spending: 1992-2010. Health services research.
- Quality-adjusted cost of care: a meaningful way to measure growth in innovation cost versus the value of health gains. Health Affairs.
- Economic Burden of Undiagnosed Nonvalvular Atrial Fibrillation in the United States. American Journal of Cardiology.
People in 228 countries have checked out Healthcare Economist, with the most users coming from the following countries:
- U.S.: 1,097,443 (77.8%)
- UK: 45,689 (3.4%)
- Canada: 37,670 (2.7%)
- India: 26,130 (1.8%)
- Germany: 13,649 (1.0%)
- Australia: 12,409 (0.9%)
- Singapore:11,156 (0.8%)
- Netherlands: 8,879 (0.6%)
- Phillipines 8,102(0.6%)
- France: 7,719 (0.5%)
I hope this blog has been as fun for you to read as it has for me to write. I’m not sure what the next ten years will bring, but the last ten years have been a blast. Thank you for sharing it with me.