Friday Links
VBID and medication adherence. eConsult. Do drugs reduce ED use during pregnancy? Mindfulness and managed care. Looming cuts to NIH.
Month: March 2017
Does tort reform harm innovation?
The answer appears to be yes according to an NBER working paper by Galasso and Luo: We find that, on average, laws that limit the liability exposure of healthcare providers are associated with a significant reduction in medical device patenting and that the effect is predominantly driven by innovators located in the states passing the…
EMR Adoption: Not what you might expect
Are urban or rural physician practices more likely to adopt electronic medical records (EMR)? The answer is suprrising. A paper by Whitacre (2016) finds the following: Overall practice-level EMR adoption rates generally increase with the degree of rurality and range from 47 percent in the most urban counties to over 60 percent in the most…
Will OCM dis-incentivize innovation?
The answer seems to be yes according to a paper by Seiden, Neubauer and Verrilli (2017). Although the Oncology Care Model (OCM) rewards practices both for improving quality and reducing cost, practices are not rewarded for dramatic increases in quality at marginal cost increases because financial returns are dependent on the creation of some cost savings. The…
Links to start the week
Winners and losers. Is the U.S. really an HCE outlier? Superbugs. No IO in UK? Basic income’s version of the RAND HIE. What is CAR-T?
Health Wonk Review is up
Peggy Salvatore has posted the “May You Live in Interesting Times” Edition of Health Wonk Review at Health Systems Ed Blog, and as you might expect in a week that saw the release of the Republican’s proposed Obamacare replacement plan, it’s a solid, jam-packed edition.
Why don’t people like the American Health Care Act?
There has been a lot of criticism of the Republican’s “repeal and replace” bill known as the American Health Care Act. The critiques are coming from both the left and the right. Let’s look at just one provision–the premium age bands–to better understand why both people on the left and right do not like the…
Overview of the American Health Care Act (a.k.a. “Repeal and Replace”)
Before we get into the details of how the American Health Care Act bill will proposed to change the current system, let’s first talk about what is not changing. In fact, while “repeal and replace” has a catchy ring to it, there is a lot that is staying the same. As Ezra Klein of Vox notes,…
Immigrant Physicians
Interesting facts from Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution: One percent of all the physicians in the United States come from the six countries targeted in Donald Trump’s new Executive Order. I found that a surprisingly high number. According to the Immigrant Doctors Project, those 7000 physicians provide 14 million doctors’ appointments each year and many of them…
Measuring the quality of cancer care
How do you measure the quality of care patients with cancer receive? How long they live? Avoiding side effects? Patient satisfaction? Process measures? Further, there are multiple types of cancer and different cancer have different recommended treatments and methods of providing care. To further complicate the issue, new cancer treatments are being introduced in rapid succession;…