Friday Links
Are hospitals separating COVID and non-COVID patients? SLR on GBTM. FDA on molecular COVID testing. Biden health care plan. George Hill.
Author: Jason Shafrin
How can expanding traditional value frameworks address inequities in health outcomes?
The answer comes in an interview my colleague Meena Venkatachalam and I had with the American Journal of Managed Care. Check out the full intereview here.
What is the impact of pharmaceuticals on US life expectancy?
A paper by Buxbaum et al. (2020) examines changes in life expectancy in the U.S. and finds that life expectancy increased by 2.5 years between 1990 and 2015. These data on mortality came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (CDC WONDER) database. More interesting is that the…
ICER vs. NICE
A nice (pun intended) paper by Thokala et al. (2020) compares the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) along 4 dimensions: structure, methods, process, and use in decision-making. While ICER and NICE methods are fairly similar, ICER is a non-governmental body without any explicit…
Drug pricing trends
Price increases have decelerated. While the cost of specialty drugs has continue to rise, the cost of traditional drugs is now falling. The net impact is modest changes in drug prices (<5%) since 2016. Hat tip: Drug Channels.
Friday Links
Why cost-effectiveness thresholds should not decline during a pandemic. IVI on value assessment. Identifying your rare disease. Binding arbitration and out-of-network billing. COVID surge over Labor Day?
On technological advances over the last 175 years
From an interesting article in Scientific American: When we look back on the past 175 years, the manipulation of matter and energy stands out as a central domain of both scientific and technical advances. Techno-scientific innovations have sometimes delivered on their promises and sometimes not. Of the biggest advances, three really did change our lives—probably…
Does the government really need to provide financial support for COVID vaccine development?
Based on an a medRχiv working paper by Vu by et al. (2020), the answer from an analysis of other emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) is an overwhelming ‘yes’. The authors analyze hypothetical investment returns of a portfolio of 141 pre-clinical emerging infectious disease (EID) vaccine development programs across different emerging infections without a vaccine. These…
Battling Epidemics & Disparity with Modeling
This is the title of a paper published in Letters in Biomathematics with colleagues Anuj Mubayi, Jeff Sullivan, Oliver Diaz, Aditi Ghosh, Anamika Mubayi, Olcay Akman, and Phani Veeranki. The subtitle is: “The Coupled Dynamics of the COVID-19 Pandemic with Social Epidemics“. The abstract is below. Policymakers are under intense pressure to respond effectively to…
The growing influence of private equity in medicine
Physicians are increasingly becoming parts of larger and larger practice. Further, many physicians are shifting from firm owners to employees. In recent years, private equity investments have helped to accelerate this trend. A paper by Brusch et al. (2020) reviews this trend among women’s health practices (i.e., o bstetrics/gynecology (OB/GYN) or fertility services). They look…