Has Medicine Reached the Digital Age? Five Key Obstacles Digital Technologies Still Need to Overcome

That is the title of a recent commentary published in the Journal of Clinical Pathways with my colleague David Gruber. New digital technologies have the potential to greatly improve our healthcare system on multiple fronts. Telemedicine allowed many patients to communicate with their doctors during the COVID-19 pandemic; during the height of the pandemic, 30% of…

Uncertainty and Vaccination Decisions

An interesting result from Courbage and Peter (2021): …uncertainty about the probability of side effects and the efficacy of the vaccine always reduces take-up under ambiguity aversion. However, uncertainty about the underlying disease, being the probability of sickness or the probability of a severe course of disease, may either encourage or discourage vaccination. Because vaccination…

Impact of Medicare Pay-for-Performance Program for Surgical Procedures on Cost and Outcomes

In 2008, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) implemented the Hospital-Acquired Conditions Present on Admission (HAC-POA) program. The goal of this program was to reduce the frequency of high-cost complications among Medicare beneficiaries. The mandatory program penalized hospitals as it would no longer reimburse them for treating of preventable complications that developed during…

Impact of Certificate of Need on Health

An interesting paper from Kevin Chiu in the Journal of Health Economics looks at the relationship between certificate of need laws and health outcomes: Certificate of need (CON) regulations requires that health care providers obtain state approval before offering a new service or expanding existing facilities. The purported goal of CON regulations is to reduce…

Impact of star ratings on provider demand

For years, Medicare and other payers have used quality measures to evaluate the quality of care patients receive at various types of providers settings (e.g., hospital, home health agencies, skilled nursing homes). For some payers, higher quality scores/higher star ratings lead to direct increases in reimbursement through a value-based purchasing arrangement. Typically, value-based payment systems…