Steps Health Professionals Can Take to Reduce Inequality in Health Outcomes

That is the title of an article in AJMC co-authored with Meena Venkatachalam. An excerpt is below: While decision-makers traditionally have ignored the issue of inequality, academic researchers have already developed tools to quantify a treatment’s value from reductions in inequality. Two common methods for doing so are distributional cost effectiveness analysis (DCEA) and multiple-criteria…

On technology and medicine

From George Gubernikoff in JAMA Cardiology in a piece titled “The Great Technological Divide“: All too frequently as rounds are made in the hospital, physicians jockey for access to computer terminals. Hours spent entering information in required fields leave little time to enter a patient room and engage in conversation let alone perform a physical…

Alternative payment models and innovation

I’m very excited to announce that the study: “Alternative payment models and innovation: A case study of US health system adoption of a sacubitril/valsartan to treat acute decompensated heart failure” has been published in the Journal of Medical Economics last week. Co-authors on the paper are Elmar R. Aliyev, Michelle Brauer, Siyeon Park and Xian…

Network meta-analysis of sickle cell disease treatments

“Crizanlizumab and comparators for adults with sickle cell disease: a systematic review and network meta-analysis” is the title of a paper recently published in BMJ Open with co-authors Howard Thom, Jeroen Jansen, Lauren Zhao, George Joseph, Hung-Yuan Cheng, Subhajit Gupta, and Nirmish Shah. The abstract is below. Objectives Treatment options for preventing vaso-occlusive crises (VOC) among…

How to justify your survival curve extrapolation methodology

Clinical trials are typically of (relatively) short duration, but innovative treatments may impact patient survival over multiple years. Health economists and outcomes researchers often are faced with the challenge of extrapolating clinical trial survival curves to estimate long-term survival gains for the typical patient. These estimates may be done parameterically (e.g., exponential, Weibull, Gompertz, log-logistic,…