Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
In broad strokes, the American Patients First plan aims to lower list prices, lower patients’ out-of-pocket costs while maintaining incentives for innovation. In short, this is a sensible strategy, although there are some concerns about how more restrictive formulary designs could restrict consumer choice. American Patients First in brief To maintain manufacturers incentives to innovate,…
The Intelligent Economist recently named Healthcare Economist as one of the top 100 economics blogs of 2018. My blog was the first listed under the “Sub-field economics” category. To celebrate this accolade, I have spent some time redesigning the look and feel of the website to make it look cleaner and more modern. Let me…
CMS has a number of quality initiatives to measure provider quality. For instance, there is the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting Program, the Home Health Quality Reporting Requirements, the Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF) Quality Reporting Program, the Inpatient Rehabilitation Facilities (IRF) Quality Reporting Program (QRP), among others. Have these initiatives led to more patients choosing high value care? …
Will your treatment be a bacteria pill? Do physician-certified sick leaves affect employment? Writing for a mass audience. Are teaching hospitals teaching the wrong things? Paying your fair share.
Although this study about 18 months old, I just came across this and the findings were really surprising. During the office day, physicians spent 27.0% of their total time on direct clinical face time with patients and 49.2% of their time on EHR and desk work. While in the examination room with patients, physicians spent 52.9%…
We health economists deal with medical cost data all the time. One challenge we all face is that the medical cost data is often censored. The censoring may occur because the patient dies. If you are using administrative health insurance claims data, censoring may occur because people switch their health plan and leave your sample.…
This is the title of a talk by Jürgen Unützer, Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington. Although you can find an article with a video of the talk and the corresponding article at NEJM catalyst, one interesting section of the talk is pasted below: “How…
Please check out my recent paper titled “Medication Adherence Patterns Among Patients with Multiple Serious Mental and Physical Illnesses” with co-authors Joanna P. MacEwan, Alison R. Silverstein, Darius N. Lakdawalla, Ainslie Hatch and Felicia M. Forma in Advances in Health. This study is unique because it looks at medication adherence patterns among patients with…
In the news, we hear a lot about the high cost of pharmaceuticals. Just this week, there are rumors that Donald Trump will give a “major address on drug prices“. HHS Secretary Alex Azar recently stated that “Bold action is on the way’ for drug prices.” At the same time drug rebates are coming under…
Payer coverage of precision medicine. The best risk adjustment models. Meaningful use is dead. Long live “Promoting Interoperability” ICER on RWE. LTC demand in Europe. Wearables. FDA interested in AI, digital