Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is a question considered in the latest edition of The Economist. In the article “How British science came to the rescue“, the magazine notes that COVID-19 had highlighted some of the advantages the UK has. Alongside vast clinical trials, the country has been home to most of the world’s genetic sequencing, the development of…
Impact of reducing air pollution on health expenditures. Does psychotherapy work? Does losing health insurance increase claims for SSI? Why governments decide to de-fund medical services. Can nonrandomized RWE replicate RCTs?
Diversity in clinical trials Recently, the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research’s (CDER’s) released its 2020 Drug Trials Snapshots Summary Report. Part of the report examines the demographics of participants in clinical trials for the 53 drugs that FDA approved in 2020 either as new molecular entities (NMEs) under new drug applications (NDAs) or…
A few facts: Pharma is increasingly a key driver of US R&D. Pharmaceutical firms share of R&D increased from <10% in the early 1970s to 24% in 2018 (among firms in Compustat data). Moreover, 5 out of top 10 largest R&D spenders in Compustat in 2010 were pharmaceutical firms. A majority of drugs are targeted…
That is the title of my latest publication with co-authors Marlon Graf, Rifat Tuly, Christoph Glaetzer, Stacey Hickson, and Joey Mattingly. The subtitle is “How to Ensure Continued COVID-19 Vaccine Discovery and Expedite Access“. The abstract is below. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has resulted in a catastrophic burden in both health and economic…
How do you evaluate treatment efficacy and safety outside of the clinical trial setting? This is not just a question of academic interest. In last week’s JAMA, Rubin 2021 writes about some of the challenges of evaluating COVID-19 vaccines outside of a clinical trial setting. In an interesting, two-day workshop last week, the Duke Margolis…
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. Mark Twain
Urgent care centers are on the rise. Back in 2013, there were only 6,100, but this number increased to 9,616 by late 2019 a 7.9% average annual increase. The rise of urgent care could have positive or negative impacts on overall health care spending. On the one hand, increased supply could lead to higher cost…
Medicare Advantage star ratings and quality. ACA and cancer detection. We can open schools safely. SF eliminates gas stoves? Overshooting the output gap?
We have heard much about how COVID-19 has created a paradigm shift in the use of telemedicine. A paper by Patel et al. (2021) uses claims data between January 1, 2020, to June 16, 2020 to measure this trend quantitatively. They find that in a largely commercially-insured population: In the COVID-19 period, 30.1 percent of…