Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
ICER recently released a white paper titled “Advancing Health Technology Assessment Methods that Support Health Equity“. In addition to discussing a variety of methods–e.g., distributional cost-effectiveness analysis (DCEA), extended cost effectiveness analysis, multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA)–for quantifying the value of new treatments in terms of their ability to reduce health disparities, ICER also introduces the…
That is one of the key questions from the IVI”s recent Value Blueprint paper titled “Prioritized Attributes to Better Define and Measure Innovation in Health Technology Assessment“. The expert roundtable convened by IVI examines not only whether there is a consensus about how to implement the value element (“method readiness”) but also if their is…
Gaining insurance through Medicaid is likely to have diverse impacts in terms of how likely disabled individuals are to work. On the one hand, having access to health care may improve health outcomes and better enabled disabled individuals to recover (if they are short-term disabled) or better manage their disability (if they are long-term disabled).…
The Economist last week had in hopeful article on ways to break the cycle of HIV transmission, particularly among young woman who have sex with older men. Much of the discussion is on PrEP A more promising idea is to prevent girls and young women from becoming infected, ideally using methods which do not require…
That is the summary takeaway I had form reviewing the 91 page CMS guidance on the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) maximum fair price (MFP) negotiation released about 10 days ago. Below, I summarize some of the key findings. SELECTING DRUG FOR PRICE NEGOTIATION Unsurprisingly, CMS is looking for the highest cost drugs among the 10…
That is the finding from a study by Jia et al. (2023) published last week. The authors find that: Among 4003 eligible RCTs [randomized controlled trials], 1241 studies (31.0%) cited Cochrane reviews, 1698 studies (42.4%) cited prior non-Cochrane reviews, and 2265 studies (56.6%) cited either type of systematic review or both; 1738 RCTs (43.4%) cited…
Authorized generics (AGs) are generic drugs that–unlike independent generics–are sold by the brand-name drug manufacturer under a generic label. How big a role do these AGs play among Medicaid beneficiaries. A paper by Rome et al. (2023) aims to answer that using public Medicaid prescription use data between 2014 and 2020. Using these data, they…
Threats to Medicare’s new drug negotiation power Drugs likely to be involved in Medicare price negotiation. Future of the US vaccine programs. Will GPT automate your job out of existence? Drone delivery of medical supplies (and other things) explained.
That is the question posed in paper by Baker, Larcker and Wang (2022). I summarize their key arguments below. The validity of…[the DiD]…approach rests on the central assumption that the observed trend in control units’ outcomes mimic the trend in treatment units’ outcomes had they not received treatment. As the authors write: First, DiD estimates…
Through what mechanisms are patients and physicians made aware of new pharmaceuticals and decide to prescribe them. It is well known that physician peer networks often help share information about new pharmaceuticals including clinical information as well as the providers own experience using the new treatment. Other studies have shown that direct to consumer advertising…