Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
A message from the Innovation and Value Initiative (IVI) Center for Innovation & Value Research CEO Jason Spangler. I was the former Director of Research at IVI and I wish them luck with the new name as they continue with their mission to “To advance the science, practice, and use of patient-centered Health Technology Assessment…
Last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a report titled “Pharmacy Benefit Managers: The Powerful Middlemen Inflating Drug Costs and Squeezing Main Street Pharmacies.” While I won’t get into an analysis of the specific arguments FTC made, the report does have a number of interesting statistics and graphics on pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). Some…
Economics of infertility. COVID-19 impact on physician revenue. Impact of rent control. GLP-1’s often discontinued within 2 years. Life before EHRs.
This is the title of a new paper I have out today at JMCP with co-authors Shanshan Wang, Jaehong Kim, Slaven Sikirica, and Alexander Sandhu with the subtitle “An economic model measuring the impact of sotagliflozin among patients with heart failure and diabetes“. The abstract is below: BACKGROUND: Heart failure (HF) is among the leading…
Check out my new publication with co-authors Suhail Thahir, Alexa Klimchak, Ivana Audhya, Lauren Sedita, and John Romley titled “Quantifying the Insurance Value for Rare Diseases: Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy” in AJMC. The abstract is below. Objectives: To quantify the magnitude of an ISPOR novel value element, insurance value, as applied to new treatments for a rare,…
Patients hate narrow networks. Anything that limits their choice of physicians or hospitals is disliked. Americans love more choice. Payers, on the other hand, like narrow networks because they save cost–through the ability to negotiate lower rates–and potentially increase quality–if the contracted network has higher quality physicians. In fact, according to the KFF Employer Health…
It makes sense that more educated individuals have lower mortality rates. Better education may improve health literacy. More education can lead to higher income and and more employee health benefits (with better insurance coverage). However, does living in communities with more educated individuals impact mortality separately from whether an individual’s family is highly educated? According…
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS’) Prescription Drug Consumer Price Index (CPI‐Rx) looks at price changes for drugs dispensed at outpatient retail pharmacies. However, many pharmaceuticals–especially infusions and injections–are administered at physician offices or hospitals. How would including physician-administered drugs impact the CPI-Rx? That is the question a paper by Hicks, Berndt and Frank (2024)…
The 340B Drug Pricing Program is a federal initiative designed to help certain healthcare providers, known as “covered entities,” stretch their resources to better serve vulnerable and underserved patient populations. Created in 1992, the program requires pharmaceutical manufacturers to sell outpatient drugs at significantly discounted prices (typically 25% to 50% off) to eligible hospitals, clinics,…
A paper by Drummond et al. (2023) examines how health technology assessment bodies deal with the challenge of value assessment for cell and gene therapies (also known as Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMPs) in Europe). To do this the authors: …undertook i) a targeted review of the literature on the clinical and economic evidence needs…