Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Let’s say that you have data. This could be say data on how many points Giannis Antetokounmpo scored in a game. One could fit some distribution to the data. For instance, you may know the mean and standard deviation and you could estimate a normal distribution. However, the data may not be normal. Or the…
My paper with co-authors Shanshan Wang and Kirk Kirr just came out in the Journal of Long-Term Care titled Wound-Specific Oral Nutritional Supplementation Can Reduce the Economic Burden of Pressure Injuries for Nursing Homes: Results from an Economic Model. The abstract is below. Background To measure the cost savings and staff time savings of wound-specific…
Here is the CMS Factsheet and news coverage from NY Times. The companies that make each of these drugs is listed below. Eliquis – Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer Jardiance- Boehringer Ingelheim and Eli Lilly Xarelto – Johnson & Johnson Januvia – Merck Farxiga – AstraZeneca Entresto – Novartis Enbrel – Amgen Imbruvica,- AbbVie and…
Interesting study from Nelson-Coffey et a. (2023) showing the positive impact of both felt and expressed gratitude. First, in a 7-day daily experience study conducted in 2018 (N = 270), daily gratitude predicted greater well-being and family functioning, controlling for daily happiness, coder-rated care difficulty, and sociodemographics. Second, in a short-term longitudinal experiment conducted in…
GPT-4 writing code. AI gives a patient their voice back. Productivity and hospitals. Impact of Long COVID in workers’ comp. “Insurers negotiated median hospital prices for commercial plans that were two to three times higher than their MA prices in the same hospital for the same service.”
One concern when using quality adjusted life years (QALY) to measure health gains for cost effectiveness research is that QALYs “undervalue” health gains from life extension for people with serious illness or chronic disability. To see this clearly, take a look at the QALY formula (first formula below) and how it can be decomposed into…
Form Kaiser Health News: That’s why desperate patients like Nix — and even some physicians — say they have turned to publicly shaming insurance companies on social media to get tests, drugs, and treatments approved.“Unfortunately, this has become a routine practice for us to resort to if we don’t get any headway,” said Shehzad Saeed,…
National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) examines trends in opioid overdoses in their recent infographic. Unsurprisingly, opioid deaths have risen dramatically in recent years, but may have plateaued in the last 12 months. Opioid deaths are more common among prime working age individuals (age 25-54). NIHCM used data from the Wide-ranging Online Data for…
The U.S. is one of the the few developed nations without a government-run health technology assessment (HTA) body. Or are they? A recent perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine by Peter Neumann and Sean Tunis argues that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) already is serving as a de facto HTA…
Generalized risk-adjusted cost effectiveness (GRACE) aims to incorporate risk preferences into standard cost effectiveness analysis (CEA) methods. While traditional CEA assumes individuals are risk neutral, GRACE allows for risk preferences to influence value. Namely, that health gains in more severely ill health states are valued more than equivalent health gains in better health states. But…