Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The placebo effect is well-known in medicine. Give people a sugar pill, they have shown, and those patients — especially if they have one of the chronic, stress-related conditions that register the strongest placebo effects and if the treatment is delivered by someone in whom they have confidence — will improve. Tell someone a normal…
That is the question asked by Peter Neumann, Madison Silver, and Joshua T. Cohen in their recent Health Affairs blog article. The authors use publicly-available information from ICER reports, in order to analyze committee member votes across 48 treatments assessed by ICER. ICER reports considered were published between December 2014 and August 2018. As shown…
As explained by Tyler Cowen: Hope everyone has a good weekend.
Difference-in-differences attempts to measure causal effects using changes in outcomes across different groups. One of the key assumptions of differences-in-differences specification are that pre-period trends are similar across these groups. But what happens if these pre-period trends do appear? Can the use of propensity score matching solve the problem. According to a paper by Daw…
Building bridges. Stents, the Shape Memory Effect and Superelasticity. Does digital lead to poor surgeons?W Will a drug work for you? Can 23andMe really help answer this question? Utah-Mexico new medical tourism connection. Doing business. ACA reduced insurance disparities. FDA guidance on meta-analysis.
In the past few weeks, I discussed how well Hospital Compare does on measuring the quality of hospital care (see here and here). Now, I turn to how well Nursing Home Compare does on truly measuring quality of care. A study by Brauner et al. (2018) attempts to answer this question. They compare the quality…
Pharmacists are often seen as individuals who just dispense drugs. However, pharmacists are increasingly considered as providers that are part of the broader health care team. My own research has shown that pharmacists are a more cost-effective and safe approach to getting vaccinations compared to primary care providers (see Fontanesi et al. 2009). A Health Affairs Entry…
CMS is increasingly moving to alternative payment models whereby providers are paid based on their ability to improve/maintain quality and hold the line on cost. A key question then, is how does CMS evaluate quality of care? Today, the Healthcare Economist will answer this question for the case of Medicare’s Shared Savings Program (MSSP), which…
Treating cancer: the promise of IO combination therapy. FDA on developing drugs for rare diseases. CEA: v-thresholds vs. k-thresholds. Pharma fights back against PBMs by slashing prices? Debt to double by 2050? Sex workers over-report use of condoms. Are concerns over FDA’s “Pre-Cert for Software Pilot Program” justified? Moneyball in Medicare.