Bayes vs. Fisher
An interesting People of Science video compares the approaches of two titans of statistics, Ronald A. Fisher and Thomas Bayes.
Month: February 2018
Do expensive drugs reduce the price of health?
The answer is ‘yes’ according to a report by the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) titled Reforming Biopharmaceutical Pricing at Home and Abroad. Innovations such as new drugs often reduce the price of health even when the new drug is very expensive relative to other goods. Consider the example of a patient diagnosed with HIV…
Collecting data on health state utilities
If you had a given disease, how bad would it be? Can we quantify people’s happiness based on different diseases? One way to do this is to measure patient preferences using a concept known as health state utilities. As stated in a recent ISPOR guidelines, health state utilities are “estimates of the preference for a given…
Health care in Peru
Located in South America, Peru is almost twice the size of Texas and has 31 million people. About one third of these live along the coast, largely in Lima. About half of the population–largely Amerinidan population–live in the Andean highlands, with the rest spread on the eastern slopes of the Andes and the adjoining rainforest. …
How to become a centaur
Interesting article on how human intelligence and artificial intelligence can be seen as complements rather than substitutes. Human+AI combinations have been shown to perform better than human or AI alone. Why? AIs are best at choosing answers. Humans are best at choosing questions. The advent of AI is not a zero sum game. The symbiotic…
AI, Robots and the Future of Health Care
Interesting video from Wired on how artificial intelligence (AI) software may help improve patient care in the future.
How restrictive value assessments affect R&D and innovation
Health technology assessment (HTA) is growing in popularity. Already widely entrenched in Europe, in the U.S. value frameworks are being used to measure the cost effectiveness of different therapies. Some of these frameworks, however, take a narrow view of societal benefits and value to include components of value to patients or society such as caregiver…
Cancer survival around the world
An interesting study measuring trends in cancer survival between 2000 and 2014 found, unsurprisingly, that patients in more developed countries had better survival. For women diagnosed with breast cancer between 2010 and 2014, 5-year survival rates reached 89.5% in Australia and 90.2% in the United States, but generally varied worldwide and remained low in some…
Monday Links
Practice makes perfect. CON fail. Love conquers all but nicotine. Growing popularity of the welfare state. “Fairness” is not always how things get done.
What’s at stake if U.S. drug prices fall?
In his 2018 State of the Union address, President Trump said that “fixing the injustice of high drug prices” will be one of the top priorities of his administration in the coming year. Lower drug prices could directly benefit consumers without insurance or those with high-deductible health plans; commercially insured individuals could hope to see…