Longitudinal Modelling of Healthcare Expenditures: Challenges and Solutions

Previous analyses–such as Basu and Manning 2009–have addressed the problem of mass of health care expenditures around $0. In typical economic analyses, we assume that the dependent variable is normally distributed. In the case of health care expenditures, however, a large number of people have $0 expenditures (i.e., healthy individuals). Further, among sick individuals that…

The gold standard of scientific evidence

That is the title of my latest article in Pharmaceutical Market Europe. An excerpt is below. Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are regarded as the gold standard of scientific evidence, and for good reason. By randomizsing a treatment across study arms, RCTs eliminate patient-treamtent selection bias, resulting in reliable causal inference. In contrast, in the real…

Friday Links

Science facts from 2017. Peak pharma? 2017 year in charts. Nature’s 10. Physicians ignore an important source of data…the patient.  “If you don’t sit and talk with a patient for a half hour, in terms of your job description no one is going to be mad at you. But if you don’t know what the hemoglobin…