Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Did COVID-19 affect quality of life valuations? Medication adherence measurement: claims vs. pharmacy fill data. “Patients’ free choice of physicians is not always good” Digital Health funding stats. Academic research on digital health. Impact of hospice care on family costs. Impact of VBID for patients with diabetes. “Being sick is a full-time job”
When typical drugs lose their period of exclusivity, new generic competitors arrive on the market with drastically lower prices. As patients switch from brand to generic drugs, the price of treatments declines. For biologic drugs, biosimilar uptake, however, is significantly less. In part, this is because biosimilars are difficult to manufacture so the price differences…
An exciting addition to the FTI team. Below is the press release: Washington, D.C., Sept. 21, 2021 — FTI Consulting, Inc. (NYSE: FCN) today announced that former Rep. Allyson Y. Schwartz has been named a Senior Advisor within its Strategic Communications segment. A nationally recognized leader in healthcare policy, Congresswoman Schwartz will advise clients on…
That is the question that a recent JAMA study–Mulcahy et al. (2021)–aim to answer. The authors use IQVIA MIDAS data to estimate sales price and volume in the US. These can can be used to estimate drug wholesale acquisition cost (WAC), but they ignore rebates. To account for rebates in the US they use SSR…
This is what a study by Whaley et al. (2021) aims to find out. Many employers have introduced rewards programs as a new benefit design in which employees are paid $25–$500 if they receive care from lower-priced providers. Our goal was to assess the impact of the rewards program on procedure prices and choice of…
Federal government worker vaccine mandate. Hospitals vs. nurses on vaccine mandates. AMA response to Medicare physician fee schedule revisions. Boston, SF, San Diego. The end of nursing homes in Canada?
Getting from a mRNA COVID-19 vaccine to scaling to manufacture these vaccines for billions of people is far from simple: Manufacturing mRNA vaccines for the first time in a very short timeframe required significant innovation and remains a technically challenging endeavor. The process proved to be technically challenging as Pfizer developed a 50,000 step process.…
Health outcomes have improved in the US over the last 25 years. Clearly public health initiatives (e.g., reduced smoking rates) is having an impact, but another key key question is, what is medical technologies are driving these gains? Is it new surgical techniques, better diagnostics, improved medical devices, or new pharmaceuticals? This answer is difficult…
A paper by Rand and Kesselheim (2021) in Health Affairs this month conducts a systematic literature review to answer this question. Based on 113 articles they identified in peer-reviewed journals, they identify the following 10 criticisms categories. The graph above has each criticism category and the number of peer-reviewed articles that mention this critique type.…
This Sunday I had a very enjoyable experience giving a guest lecture at the University of Southern California’s Healthcare Decision Analysis program (specifically class HCDA 520). The topic of the class was “Health Economics & Outcomes Methodology” and my lecture was on “Novel approaches to quantifying value”. Thank you to Professor Daniel Tomaszewski for inviting…