AI comes to Medicine?
HT: Marginal Revolution.
Month: July 2023
How do social determinants of health impact health outcomes?
There are many studies that show that social determinants of health (SDOH) impact health outcomes. A more challenging question is how do SDOH impact health outcomes? Specifically, through what pathways or mechanisms do SDOH operate? A paper by Thimm-Kaiser (2023) identifies 8 mechanisms through which SDOH impact outcomes. These include: SDOH are underlying causes of…
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Depopulation in Japan: “there are now more gangsters in their 70s than in their 20” Expanding primary care in rural areas. “…underlying suicide-related behaviors among children, while alarmingly high, may not have risen as sharply as reported rates suggest” Returns from IRS tax audits across the income distribution Large language models for statisticians.
The Overlooked Reason Our Health Care System Crushes Patients
That is the title from a recent N.Y. Times article. Here is an excerpt: There’s a general sense that all that unpaid labor required to get medical care is increasing. This is in part because as health costs spiral upward, health plans have tried to find incentives to steer treatment to reduce costs. These incentives…
Should race/ethnicity variables should be used in developing clinical prediction algorithms?
That is the question a paper by Anirban Basu (2023) in Science Advances attempts to answer. A key assumption the article makes is that race is a social and not a biological construct. Basu justifies this assumption by stating that “the vast majority of genetic variation associated with race-specific traits exists within racial groups and…
Social Vulnerability Metric: An improved SDoH measure?
A paper by Saulsberry et al. (2023) argues that the Social Vulnerability Metric (SVM) is an improvement over previous social determinants of health (SDOH) measures such as the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI). SVI uses census tract level data to construct overall community rankings based on variables included in four themes: “Socioeconomic Status” including percentages below…
On which drugs does Medicare spend the most?
The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) identifies the Part D drugs on which Medicare spends the most money. This is an important question since CMS will begin drug price negotiation under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) based on the top 10 top spending Part D drugs. Some relevant statistics and figures are below. In 2021, Medicare…
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Income and health care expenditures in Canada. Opioids vs. placebo. Why do cancer cells have extra chromosomes. Trends in healthy lifestyles. Microeconomics and cell biology. Drivers of increased suicide rates in the US over the past 2 decades. Barrier to biosimilar uptake: 340B. Peterson Health Technology Institute launched. Sex education and social media.
Risk of losing health insurance in the US is high
From Einav and Finkelstein (2023): …while 12.5% of individuals under 65 are uninsured at a point in time, twice as many—one in four—are uninsured at some point over a 2-y period. Moreover, the risk of losing insurance remained virtually unchanged with the introduction of the landmark ACA. Risk of insurance loss is particularly high for…
More generous unemployment insurance improves infant health outcomes
An NBER paper by Dettling and Kearney (2023) finds that unemployment rate impacts both fertility rates and birth outcomes. Using data on birth outcomes from National Center for Health Statistics, data on local unemployment from BLS’s Local Area Unemployment Statistics, data on the share of families who are liquidity-constrained from the Survey of Consumer Finances.…