Friday Links
Urgent care vs. ED. FDA review of old drugs. R&D incentives and innovation spillovers. Pharmaceuticals and the Developing World. Care managers vs cost centers.
Month: April 2021
Average cost to bring a drug to market is over $1 billion
The cost to bring a drug to market is a hotly debated topic. The costs include not only the costs for basic science and clinical trials. However, one must also take into account the cost of capital (since most cost are incurred up front, but revenue begins only after drug approval) and the likelihood of…
Is value in the eye of the beholder? Value frameworks and inter-rater reliability
A new drug comes on the market. Is the health benefit worth the cost? What is it’s value? Value assessment frameworks are one way to answer this question. Value frameworks take the evidence of the treatments benefits, risk and cost and output some notion of the treatment’s value. Ideally, if anyone applied a given value…
Should you risk adjust for social factors?
If you want to implement value-based care, you need to define what a ‘good’ outcome is. A good outcome may be different for different individuals. For instance, if you look at mortality rates for a given disease, it makes sense that individuals age 80 and above will have higher mortality rates than those 20-29 year…
Links
Misperceptions of people with disabilities. A bundled payment success story. Do people with COVID-19 tell their employers? The history of vaccine backlash. Oral COVID-19 vaccine? Things are getting better. Vaccines in Gibraltar.
When Should You Trust Your Doctor?
That is the title of a recent study I published with Michael Halasy in Mayo Clinic Proceedings. The subtitle is Establishing a Theoretical Model to Evaluate the Value of Second Opinion Visits. The abstract is below: In order to produce a mathematical model for better understanding of the benefits and utilization of second opinions and…
Measuring Hospital Quality
Quality of care is difficult to measure. Even if you had a perfect measure of quality in terms of health outcomes, risk adjustment is imperfect. For instance, academic medical centers are often assumed to have high quality, but actual outcomes observed in the data may not be that good if they also receive the sickest,…
Highlights from MedPAC’s Spring 2021 Report
Here are a few highlight’s from the March 2021 report on Medicare Payment Policy from the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC). Leading causes of death The leading cause of death are heart disease, cancer, and respiratory disease. Note that these figures are from 2018. MedPAC notes that the 3rd leading cause of death in 2020…
Measuring the Value Healthy Individuals Place on Generous Insurance Coverage of Severe Diseases
That is the title of a paper I just published at Value in Health with Suepattra G. May, Lauren M. Zhao, Katalin Bognar, Yong Yuan, John R. Penrod, and John A. Romley. The subtitle is A Stated Preference Survey of Adults Diagnosed With and Without Lung Cancer. The full abstract is below: Objectives: To compare…
Medicare eats the world
In 2020, Medicare premiums and cost sharing were estimated to consume 24 percent of the average Social Security benefit, up from 14 percent in 2000. The Medicare Trustees estimate that in another 20 years, these costs will consume 31 percent of the average Social Security benefit. Medicare Payment Advisory Committee (MedPAC), March 2021 report