Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
There has been much debate about whether we should increase the use of nurse practitioners and physician assistants in medical care. Proponents argue that doing so may reduce cost and increase access, while critics would say that quality may decrease. An analogous issue in the dental space is use of dental hygienists as compared to…
Fail fast in statistical computing. NBA’s $600m man. Medicaid coverage and abortion rates. On open AI (not written Open AI) Parallels:child care vs. health care in Canada.
The Rippel Foundation has an interesting framework to describe the dimensions for improving health and overall individual quality of life. This is part of their mission to guide “transformational change that supports better health and well-being for all—a future where everyone thrives, without exception.” The organization identified relevant desirable outcomes of health and wellness as…
If a child dies during childbirth, should the impact of the child’s death on parental quality of life be considered? What about interventions that prevent miscarriages; should the health of the fetus be considered or only that of the mother? A paper by Lamsal et al. (2024) conducts a systematic review to examine which individual’s…
If you go to the doctor or dentist in the US, you often can get a discount if you pay out of pocket as compared to paying through insurance. Why is that the case? Wouldn’t the physician like to get a big insurance company to pay them as compared to potentially incurring credit card fees…
That is the title of the podcast episode I was on for AJMC’s Managed Care Cast. We discuss my recently published paper on insurance value in Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy (DMD). To learn more about research in DMD, check out AJMC’s DMD compendia page. The full podcast is below.
Health Services Research has decided that studies using logistic regressions should report marginal effects rather than odds ratios. Why did they make this decision? A paper by Norton et al. (2024) identifies 3 key factors. Intelligibility. Consider the case of examining the impact of whether a hospital is in a disadvantaged area on readmission rates.…
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.