Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
IV methods are usually implemented using a two‐stage approach where the first stage estimates an expectation of the endogenous variable conditional on measured confounders and one or more IV. The second stage model then predicts outcomes as a function of the estimated treatment values from the first stage, measured confounders, and potentially other control variables.…
Drugs known as “orphan” drugs are those used to treat rare disease. However, how “rare” is rare disease? In Europe, a rare disease is one affecting 5 or fewer people per 10,000 residents. In the U.S. this figure is less than one in every 1,500 residents. Although each rare disease is–by definition–rare, about 350 million…
Economist and N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman provided a tribute to the late Uwe Reinhardt. Although I won’t get into any of Krugman’s comments of Reinhardt as a person, I did find Krugman’s comments about his perception of the field of health economics interesting. For instance: In case you don’t know this, health economics is…
Along with co-authors Michelle Skornicki, Michelle Brauer, Julie Villeneuve, Michael Lees, Nadine Hertel, John R. Penrod, and Jeroen Jansen, our paper “An exploratory case study of the impact of expanding cost-effectiveness analysis for second-line nivolumab for patients with squamous non-small cell lung cancer in Canada: Does it make a difference?” was recently published online in…
Today I participated in a fantastic panel presentation at the 2018 Academy of Managed Care & Specialty Pharmacy Conference in Boston. Moderated by Jonathan Collar of Cigna-Health Spring, the session discussed “New Tools for Measuring Treatment Value in Rheumatoid Arthritis“. My co-presenters were Jeroen Jansen from the Innovation and Value Initiative and Dr. Jeff Curtis, a…
Not all medical problems can or should be treated by a nurse practitioner (NP). However, may can be. Increasing access to care through NPs can reduce wait times through expanding access and decrease cost. The access and cost issues are not in doubt; the question is, can NPs improve or at least maintain patient care? …
Many researchers use logit models to estimate the effect of specific variables on a binary (i.e., 0 or 1) outcome. How are these models derived? How are odds ratios calculated? What are the problems with odds ratios? I answer all these questions in this post, following a lovely summary by Norton and Dowd (2018). Deriving…
“Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.” Ambrose Bierce, HT: The Browser.
Progress on risk-based agreements. ACOs increase cost? P4P fail with gym memberships. The importance of reading. “Super Bowl of lung cancer immunotherapy” Apple Watch health data leads to murder conviction. plus The Spring is Here! HWR.
One idea is to provide additional funding for both formal and informal caregiving services. For instance, one could subsidize nursing homes or home health agencies on the formal side; for informal caregiving, one could give stipends to individuals to care for their elderly parents. The question is, does this implementation actually work? This is the…