Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
As of 2007, about half of physicians had noncompete clauses (“noncompetes” for short) in their contracts. However, a recent FTC rule severely limits when they could be used. What specifically did the new FTC rule say about non-competes? Fuse Brown et al. (2024) provide a helpful summary. The final FTC rule declares all new noncompete clauses or…
How do companies decide which drugs to develop? “attending a more selective college causally reduces obesity” 28% of patients with HIV were covered by Medicare The AI Scientist + End-to-end causal effect estimation Development approval timelines and new housing supply in LA
Check out my new paper titled “Healthcare Stakeholder Perspectives on a Value Assessment Approach for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy Therapies“. The abstract is below. Purpose: Traditional value assessment frameworks are challenged in comprehensively assessing the societal value new therapies bring to individuals with rare, progressive, genetic, fatal, neuromuscular diseases such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). The…
Managing multiple medications is a challenge for many individuals, particularly the elderly. One study by Almodóvar et al. (2019) found that among Medicare beneficiaries eligible for medication therapy management (MTM), 51% had used 11 or more medications. One approach to improving medication management is to use an appointment-based model (ABM) and other forms of medication…
The RE-AIM framework developed by Glasgow et al. (1999) has five evaluation components. Reach: share of people from a given population who participate in a program and their characteristics. For instance, organizational reach with stakeholders could be indirect, intended or direct. Reach is the number of participants in the program divided by the size of…
That is the title of my new paper in Annals of the American Thoracic Society with co-authors David Ost, Fabien Maldonado, Jaehong Kim , Moises Marin, Tony Amos, Deanna Hertz, Iftekhar Kalsekar, and Anil Vachani. The abstract is below. Rational: While previous studies have assessed the clinical or economic value of specific technologies, the economic…
One key aspect of many medications is that they not only help people feel better, but often these medications can help them re-enter the workforce, work more hours, work more productively, or all of the above. However, when evaluating new treatments for diseases that impact older Medicare beneficiaries (≥65 years), should we take into account…
Biosimilar may no longer need to run switching studies. Price responsiveness to telehealth cost sharing. Getting charged for two surgeries rather than one. When is high income inequality a good thing? Passwords vs. passkeys.
An interesting study from Miquel Serra-Burriel et al. (2024) examines the impact of genericization on drug prices across 8 high-income countries (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, UK, and US). The authors used 2011-2020 IQVIA MIDAS data across 505 novel originator drugs. They found that: Price decreases were statistically significant over the 8 years after…
Should payers cover a new oncology treatment targeting specific biomarkers across multiple tumor types? One the one hand, one could require a separate trial for each tumor type. While this would be convincing evidence, it also is very expensive to conduct clinical trials for every tumor type, particularly if treatment efficacy is homogenous across tumor…