Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Is it clinical benefit? Cost? Value? The availability of treatment alternatives? To answer this question, a paper by Wranik et al. (2019) conducted a discrete choice experiment DCE to determine HTA stakeholders stated preferences. The sample consisted of HTA stakeholders from 5 countries: Australia, Canada, Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom. The stakeholders included not…
Should we infect people with COVID-19? Although most people would say ‘no’, this prospect could help speed the development of a vaccine. In these trials, half the people would be treated with a test vaccine for COVID-19 and half the people would receive a placebo. Then, people in both arms would be infected with COVID-19…
Queuing models were developed by Agner Erlang in 1904 to help determine the capacity needed for the Dutch telephone system. Since health care systems often have to deal with capacity constrains and plan for unforeseen surges in demand, queuing theory provides a useful approach for many health care research questions. Also, these models are typically…
The answer is ‘yes’ based on recent research from Neale Kinnear as reviewed in The Economist. The key finding was that: …reaction times…when the touchscreen was being employed were more than 50% longer than standard for some tasks. This was worse than the 46% impairment found in a previous simulator study looking at the effects…
Biosimilar uptake in the US is strong. COVID-19 pooled testing strategy. Banksy. Why did anyone ever listen to this guy? LA’s COVID-19 testing.
COVID-19 has wreaked havoc for patients, family, the economy and the health care system. In an attempt to provide support to families and businesses, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act injects funding into the economy. Further, regulations have been relaxed. As Michael Adelberg and Melissa Garrido write today in the Health Affairs…
Precision medicine is the future…at least that is what we have been told. But to treat patients based on genetic biomarkers, one first has to test for these biomarkers. What factors to payers consider when evaluating whether or not they should provide coverage for these genetic tests? This is the exact question that Dhanda et…
Siddhartha Mukherjee has a great article in The New Yorker titled “What the Coronavirus Crisis Reveals About American Medicine“. Much of the article details some of the fundamental problems that causes major failures in the U.S. health care system’s response to COVID-19. Resilience in our medical system will involve more than considerations of physical supplies.…
According to a working paper by Greenstone and Nigam (2020), the answer is a resounding yes! …we project that moderate social distancing would save 1.7 million lives between March 1 and October 1, with 630,000 due to avoided overwhelming of hospital intensive care units. Using the projected age-specific reductions in death and age-varying estimates of…
Fauci cold open. Filipino-American heroes. How close are we to a cure for COVID-19? 30m file for unemployment. Marginal structural models explained.