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Wear a mask. Election forecast uncertainty. Baby born after uterus transplant. Organ sales. Will pandemic lower health insurance premiums?
Month: July 2020
What about a cure model?
That is the title of a helpful video from Nicholas Lattimer of University of Sheffield. You can view all his videos here.
Can I use a Cox proportional hazard model to treatment effect?
In many clinical trials, the outcome of interest may be some form of time to event outcome. This could be time until death, time until hospitalization, or time until some other (typically negative) health event. One simple way to model this is to use a Cox proportional hazard (a.k.a. exponential) model. The Cox model is…
Medicaid enrollment on the rise
As reported by Kaiser Health News: Reversing a three-year decline, the number of people covered by Medicaid nationwide rose markedly this spring as the impact of the recession caused by the outbreak of COVID-19 began to take hold.Yet, the growth in participation in the state-federal health insurance program for low-income people was less than many…
We are failing at treating mental health
That is the key takeaway from a recent JAMA Viewpoint by Carlo, Barnett and Frank (2020). While there has been some progress, there are still tremendous gaps that need to be addressed. For patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or other more serious mental health conditions, less than two-thirds received care for their illness, according to…
Estimating survival gains based on clinical trial data
How do you measure the value value of new treatments that improve survival? Clearly one of the key factors for doing so is understanding how much each treatment can improve survival relative to the status quo. In practice, however, estimating this quantity is challenging in practice. First, when we say survival gain, do we mean…
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JAMA perspective on back to school. Americans with HDHP aren’t using HSAs. Where are they now: digital health unicorns. EITC and mental health. Dems: $25 billion for vaccines.
More opioid negative externalities: Pediatric opioid poisoning
Some people use opioids as a recreational drug. If people choose to ruin their own life, that is their problem. Others take opioids when prescribed from physicians and unwittingly become addicted. In either case, there is one scourge that may not fully be appreciated: parents who take opioids risk having their kids go into their…
Fentanyl tops drug overdose death rates
RAND has an interesting report titled “The Future of Fentanyl and Other Synthetic Opioids.” What is truly startling is the rise in deaths due to synthetic opioids like fentanyl in the last 5 years: from 3,000 in 2013 to approximately 30,000 in 2018. In fact, synthetic opioids are now involved in twice as many deaths…
Health care battle: US vs. England
A new study by Choi et al. (2020) compares the health of individuals aged 55-64 in the US compared to England. They use data from Health and Retirement Study (HRS)–in the US–and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) for 2008-2016. Health is measured across 16 outcomes: 5 self-assessed outcomes, 3 directly measured outcomes, and…