Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Dana Goldman, Samuel Nussbaum, and Mark Linthicum have an interesting post on the Health Affairs blog about innovation, value measurement and pricing. The article mentions the new Innovation and Value Initiative, where I serve as the Director of Research. An excerpt is below. New pricing mechanisms are needed to effectively link prices to value; we…
This is the finding of Muhlestein and Smith (2016): The proportion of physicians in groups of nine or fewer dropped from 40.1 percent in 2013 to 35.3 percent in 2015, while the proportion of those in groups of one hundred or more increased from 29.6 percent to 35.1 percent during the same time period. Initiatives requiring…
One of my papers on matching-adjusted indirect comparisons (MAIC) was published today, with co-authors Anshu Shrestha, Amitabh Chandra, M. Haim Erder, and Vanja Sikirica. The title is: “Evaluating Matching-Adjusted Indirect Comparisons in Practice: A Case Study of Patients with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder” and the abstract is below. Check it out! Differences in patient characteristics across trials may bias efficacy estimates…
Treatments for the hepatitis C virus (HCV) are expensive. At one point they cost over $80,000 per year, although costs have decreased since then. To prevent moral hazard, should insurance companies rely on cost sharing to decrease utilization? An article by Lakdawalla, Linthicum, and Vanderpuye-Orgle (2016) argues that they shouldn’t. Cost sharing appears even less efficient when…
Antibiotics are one of the greatest inventions. They rank in ABC News’s top 10 health advances of all time. However, bacteria are not static. They can change and mutate to become anti-biotic resistant. In this constant battle against disease, new antibiotics are needed. Harvard’s Mega-Plate Petri Dish experiment shows in vivid detail why the development of…
David Williams has posted Health Wonk Review: Back to School Daze at Health Business Blog David debuts the fall season with a serious roster of posts, just the thing to get us back to business.
According to two researchers, the answer is no. As they write at Stat: As we wrote recently in Science, three key barriers are impeding the drive toward truly transformational precision medicine: researchers often don’t rigorously test the biological theories that supposedly explain why a targeted treatment should work; they haven’t fully determined the accuracy of the diagnostic…
Step therapy is good in theory, but often not in practice. In step therapy, patients are required to try one drug first–typically a low cost and/or high-value treatment–before moving on to more expensive alternatives. In theory, this is a great idea. The first drug patients should try should be the highest value one. In practice, however,…
SF is the new Detroit? Is customer satisfaction liked to patient care or advertising? Trust genetic or traditional medical tests? Are ACOs starting to save money? Max Ritvo, RIP
According to an article in the American Psychological Association webpage, the answer is likely ‘yes’. Originally intended as a day for relaxation and celebration of the American worker, Labor Day today is very different from the first Labor Day in 1882. Back then, a largely industrial and agricultural workforce could disconnect from work on Labor Day…