Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Tomorrow, Monday, November 16 at 15:00 CET (9:00 EST/6:00 PST), I will be on an ISPOR Europe Panel titled “Will COVID-19 Accelerate the Adoption of Digital Health Technologies? Perspectives on Evaluating Digital Health Technologies during Global Disease Outbreaks“. The session will be moderated by Kristian Kidholm, PhD of the University of Southern Denmark, and my…
US debt rises about 100% of GDP. Racism and sickle cell disease. Health insurance among the self-employed. The interaction of minimum drinking age laws and genetics on binge drinking. Sanctuary policies and crime. Does social care prevent healthcare utilization? HDHPs impact the extensive but not intensive margins. DITF .Impact of SES on knee pain.
Interesting findings from an NBER working paper by Cronin and Evans (2020): Higher-quality nursing homes, as measured by inspection ratings, have substantially lower COVID-19 mortality. Quality does not predict the ability to prevent any COVID-19 resident or staff cases, but higher-quality establishments prevent the spread of resident infections conditional on having one. Preventing COVID-19 cases…
Given the incredible speed in which vaccine development for COVID-19 is occurring, it merits thinking back on the typical development and approval time of previous vaccines. Puthumana et al. (2020) reviews 21 vaccines approvals since 2010. They find that: …most novel vaccines approved by the FDA required about 8 years of clinical development and were…
That is the finding from a recent paper by myself and co-authors Joanna MacEwan, Syvart Dennen, Rebecca Kee, Farzad Ali, and Katharine Batt. An excerpt from the paper is below: Between 2000 and 2016, deaths per 100,000 population across the 15 most common tumor types declined by 24%. Additionally, 10.2 new indications were approved per…
Great news on progress for a COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer. From their press release: Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim efficacy analysis Analysis evaluated 94 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in trial participants Study enrolled 43,538 participants,…
Specialty drugs are often injectibles, biologic drugs, or other drugs that require specialized administration, handling, or ongoing clinical assessment. Specialty drugs are often more expensive than standard pharmaceuticals. As the use of specialty pharmaceuticals has become more common, a paper by Hill, Miller and Ding (2020) aims to quantify how much spending on specialty pharmaceuticals…
Performance of private equity-owned nursing homes during COVID-19 GrimAge #WhiteCoatsForBlackLives Jews and Catholics come together in Wisconsin. The disappearance of the primary care physical examination. Remdesivir final report. (Self-reported) mask use tops 90%.
That is the key question explored in a recent article from The Economist titled “Masked up, ready to battle bugs“. As individuals in developing nations leave crowded cities for fear of COVID, they may be at more risk for malaria due to the presence of more standing water (which attracts malarial mosquitos) used for irrigation…
Poor, elderly individuals who may qualify for both Medicaid (for being poor) and Medicare (for being elderly, blind, disabled or have ESRD). In these cases, Medicaid serves as a supplemental insurer, covering Medicare coinsurance and deductibles. The generosity of this supplemental coverage for so-called ‘dual-eligibles’ varies across states. These differences in Medicaid payments arise from…