Polio vaccination and mass hysteria

We are getting close to eradicating polio…but we are not there yet. That is why a recent article in this week’s Economist on polio vaccination in Pakistan is so troubling. Worried parents began arriving at hospitals in ones and twos, then dozens and soon hundreds. Each was convinced their child was sick, poisoned by polio…

Survival distributions in R

My former colleague Devin Incerti has a nice summary of how to implement survival function estimation in R. Not only does he mathematically describe the probability density function (PDF), cumulative density function (CDF), and hazard rates for 8 commonly used parametric survival curves [see table below], he also describes how to implement these using the…

EHR and physician burnout

Electronic health records (EHR) have the potential to greatly improve the quality of care. EHRs allow multi-specialty teams to access the same underlying medical information and eliminate the issue of miscommunication due to poor physician hand writing. At the same time, EHR increase data entry burden. Is the benefit of EHR worth the cost? One…

Will price transparency reduce prices?

Economic theory would say that in normal markets, the answer is yes. When prices are widely known, suppliers can compete on prices–as well as quality–and markets become more efficient. In the health care setting, however, a key question is ‘which price’? For hospital services, patients are the ultimate consumers of the service and do pay…

Mid-week links

Netflix model pricing for HCV drugs in Louisiana. Does “genetic nurture” cause obesity among siblings? New head of the CEA. Will health departments allow kids who don’t get a chickenpox vaccine to go to private school? “…many preferred to avoid viewing comparative clinical outcomes, particularly survival” I’m generally in favor of increased use of NPs,…