Is Uber a substitute for ambulances?

According to a paper by Moskatel and Slutsky (2019), the answer appears to be ‘yes’. In this paper, we ask whether UberX’s entry into a city caused substitution away from traditional ambulances for low‐risk patients, reducing overall volume. Using a city‐panel over‐time and leverage that UberX enter markets sporadically over multiple years, we find that…

Links

Are Nordic countries moving to private health care? A checklist for value assessment of gene therapies. The importance of loss aversion. Problem first, not solution backward. Is LA the next Silicon Valley?

Trump Executive Order to Mandate Price Transparency for Providers

As the N.Y. Times reports, more transparency is coming to provider prices. The White House released an executive order Monday afternoon intended to require insurance companies, doctors and hospitals to give patients more information about precisely what their care will cost before they get it. More transparency is generally good and surprise billing for out-of-network costs has been a major…

Patients value progression-free survival more than providers

An interesting paper from my colleagues at Precision in Medical Decision Making looks at how patients, physicians and nurses value different treatment attributes related to survival and treatment toxicity. The authors surveyed patients, oncologists, and oncology nurses using a combined conjoint analysis and discrete choice experiment survey approach. They found that: Virtually all patients preferred…

Death by 1000 clicks: Where EHRs went wrong

An interesting article over at Kaiser Health News on electronic health records (EHRs): But 10 years after President Barack Obama signed a law to accelerate the digitization of medical records — with the federal government, so far, sinking $36 billion into the effort — America has little to show for its investment…Today, 96 percent of…