Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Population-adjusted indirect comparisons (PAICs) include both matching-adjusted indirect comparisons (MAICs) and Simulated treatment comparisons (STCs). The key data requirement for these methods is that they have individual patient data (IPD) from at least one clinical trial. This means the methods are most useful for studied funded by the clinical trial sponsor or when IPD clinical…
That is the title of an article by Angela Maas in Radar on Specialty pharmacy (reprinted here). A few excerpts: “Although state governments frequently pay for health care through programs such as Medicaid, in the past, state governments have not manufactured drugs,” says Jason Shafrin, vice president of health economics at PRECISIONheor. “Thus, this is a…
Last week I reviewed an article on some of the potential positives and negatives of large, integrated health systems. A recent 60 Minutes episode talks about some of the perils by examining how Sutter health system has become a near monopoly provider in Northern California. Consider the following interaction between Leslie Stahl of 60 minutes…
In no particular order (except the first): Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake. A book about fungi, yet fascinating throughout. The author is clearly passionate about the topic . This is an understudied area of the natural world and the author takes pains to…
Smile when you get your vaccine. Financial toxicity and QoL among cancer patients. How does ICER use RWE. Challenges to buying more vaccines. Trump administration to void existing health regulations? Vaccine approved!
Integrated delivery networks. IDNs. Accountable Care Organizations. ACOs. Systems of care. Health systems. Whatever you call them, many health policy experts claim that they are the best way for the U.S. health care system to deliver high quality care in a cost-effective manner. But is that really the case? A commentary by UCSD professor and…
How do you incentivize pharmaceutical companies and researchers to develop new drugs for rare diseases? Drug development is expensive and–by definition–rare diseases have a small market. One solution to this problem is that governments have used orphan drug policies to provide monetary incentives for innovators to research drugs for rare diseases. But which countries have…
With the rise of telemedicine due to the COVID-19 pandemic and–before that–the increasing ubiquity of smartphones, digital medicine appears to be the wave of the future. At least that is the topic of a recent article on health care and technology in The Economist. Despite all this hope, we are far from a fully digital…
‘If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?’ This is a common parenting phrase is meant to motivate kids to reject peer’s actions that are bad behaviors. While this blogger will not comment how effective this parenting phrase is, peer effects are real. Consider the recent NBER working paper by Finkelstein, Gentzkow, and…
Impact of unemployment insurance on health. Digital Health trends in 2021. Making coal history. How a libertarian would allocate vaccines. LA County sets new infection record.