Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy (AMCP) held an interesting webinar titled “5 Years of ICER – Insights and Impact on Payers“. Some highlights form the presentation. Most relevant information Jeremy Lee from MedImpact–a pharmacy benefits manager (PBM)–noted that their Pharmacy and Therapeutics (P&T) committee used four key pieces of evidence when making coverage and…
Bütikofer and Salvanes (2020) in The Review of Economic Studies: This article examines the economic impact of a tuberculosis control program launched in Norway in 1948. In the 1940s, Norway had one of the highest tuberculosis infection rates in Europe, affecting about 85% of the inhabitants. To lower the disease burden, the Norwegian government launched…
STAT News has an excellent article evaluating where we are on the federal initiative to fast track the development of treatments and vaccines for COVID-19. To date, the fastest a vaccine was ever developed was four years. Operation Warp Speed, or OWS, has already spent about $10 billion to help vaccine makers develop their candidates…
Are hospitals separating COVID and non-COVID patients? SLR on GBTM. FDA on molecular COVID testing. Biden health care plan. George Hill.
The answer comes in an interview my colleague Meena Venkatachalam and I had with the American Journal of Managed Care. Check out the full intereview here.
A paper by Buxbaum et al. (2020) examines changes in life expectancy in the U.S. and finds that life expectancy increased by 2.5 years between 1990 and 2015. These data on mortality came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (CDC WONDER) database. More interesting is that the…
A nice (pun intended) paper by Thokala et al. (2020) compares the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) along 4 dimensions: structure, methods, process, and use in decision-making. While ICER and NICE methods are fairly similar, ICER is a non-governmental body without any explicit…
Price increases have decelerated. While the cost of specialty drugs has continue to rise, the cost of traditional drugs is now falling. The net impact is modest changes in drug prices (<5%) since 2016. Hat tip: Drug Channels.
Why cost-effectiveness thresholds should not decline during a pandemic. IVI on value assessment. Identifying your rare disease. Binding arbitration and out-of-network billing. COVID surge over Labor Day?
From an interesting article in Scientific American: When we look back on the past 175 years, the manipulation of matter and energy stands out as a central domain of both scientific and technical advances. Techno-scientific innovations have sometimes delivered on their promises and sometimes not. Of the biggest advances, three really did change our lives—probably…