Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Sarah Emond on Prescription for Better Access. “Nothing will have more impact on workers’ comp than significant cuts to Medicaid.” “So one can only assume that we’re not picking flu strains this year.” SLR: Palliative care effectiveness/cost effectiveness NBER: Economics of Artificial Intelligence
Quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) are commonly used to evaluate the impact of new medical technologies on patient mortality and morbidity. However, use of QALYs Many authors have discussed the fact that standard assumptions result in utility functions that are unrealistically linear and separable, overlooking the diminishing marginal utility a fundamental property of utility functions in…
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. Peter Drucker
How best can you design an outcomes based agreement (OBA)? What are the key factors to consider? Project IDEATE is a “cross-disciplinary collaboration between National Health Service (NHS) Wales, industry and academia” with the aim to develop and refine OBA models. This initiative is described in Burton et al. (2024). What were the key factors…
A paper by Proudman et al. (2024) finds that doing so would be extremely expensive. Including all preclinical, clinical and post-approval R&D activities, total annual costs to maintain the average lifecycle level of 49.4 approved drugs across all disease areas during the 2018–22 period was estimated to be $139.6 billion. Including only pre-launch costs, total…
Texas is moving to allow for more freedom of choice with respect to receipt of vaccines. The Economist reports: Texas legislators meeting in Austin, the state capital, are debating new laws to relax vaccine rules, urged on by Texans for Vaccine Choice (TFVC). On February 18th activists in “Come and Make Me” shirts took to…
In Feedspot’s 2025 rankings, Healthcare Economist was once again ranked in the top 100 economics blog (#44). I was also ranked as the #4 top health economics blog of 2025 as well. You can see their full economics blog rankings here.
Health economics and outcomes research has already started to use AI tools such as large language models (LLM) across a diverse set of study types, including systematic literature reviews (SLR), health economic modelling (HEM) and real-world evidence (RWE). In SLRs, LLMs can assist with abstract and full-text screening, bias assessment, data extraction, and automating meta-analysis…
One reason are the administrative obstacles and frictions that eligible individuals have to overcome to receive the public services. A paper by Herd and Moynihan (2025) in the Journal of Economic Perspectives provides an overview of the literature. Such burdens are the experience of policy implementation as onerous, and arise via learning costs (knowing about…
That is the subtitle of a paper by Vreman et al. (2020). The authors look at all treatments approved by FDA and EMA that were subsequently reviewed by HTA bodies in both jurisdictions between 1995 and 2018. The authors used ICER as the US HTA body; European HTA bodies included IQWiG (Germany), NICE (UK), ZIN…