Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Congratulations to Philipp Strack who has won the 2024 John Bates Clark Medal. The John Bates Clark Medal is awarded annually each April to that American economist under the age of forty who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. The American Economic Association webpage has a nice…
For patients with serious illnesses, timeline access to efficacious medications is paramount. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) was created in part to help expedite drug approvals and insure these products are save and effective. As stated in a paper by Grünwald and Stargardt (2024): The EMA [European Medicines Agency] was founded in 1995 primarily to…
That is the topic from a recent study by Hayes et al. (2024): Payments for some diagnostic scans undertaken in outpatient settings were unbundled from Diagnosis Related Group based payments in England in April 2013 to address under-provision. Unbundled scans attracted additional payments of between £45 and £748 directly following the reform. We examined the…
Generative AI for economists. Juvenile curfews on teenage birth rates. Cato on Biden Short‐Term Health Plans Rule. Parents’ education on children’s earnings. DTx for MDD.
A paper by Kogut (2024) has a nice overview of the organizations that develop pharmacy plan quality metrics. Pharmacy plan quality is vital since approximately 85% of the US population has prescription drug coverage through public (e.g., Medicare , Medicaid) or commercial (e.g., employer-provided) pharmacy plans. A helpful summary table is below. Quality measures are…
The Digital Therapeutics Alliance defines a digital therapeutic (DTx) as “evidence-based therapeutic interventions that are driven by high-quality software programs to prevent, manage, or treat a medical disorder or disease.” One key question is what factors do US payers take into account when evaluating DTx and how does that differ from standard pharmaceuticals. A paper…
People won’t be surprised to learn that AI could improve the accuracy of diagnosis, expedite the rates of drug discovery, or even replace some (or many) activities typically done by doctors. However, can AI save the health care system money? That is the question asked by a recent article in The Economist titled “Can artificial…
HEOR and decentralized clinical trials. State to crack down on prior authorizations? Memory formation and DNA. AI eye exams. Lessons on learning: Jason Kelce on band.
One reason is that reimbursement rates for Medicaid are lower than for Medicare or commercial insurance. Another (often overlooked) factor, however, is physician’s risk of payment denials and the administrative hassle they face trying to get reimbursed by Medicaid. A paper by Dunn et al. (2024)–cleverly named “A Denial a Day Keeps the Doctor Away“–shows…
Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman passed away today. His work incorporating psychology into economics through Prospect Theory has been a major advance. From the N.Y. Times obituary: Professor Kahneman delighted in pointing out and explaining what he called universal brain “kinks.” The most important of these, the behaviorists hold, is loss-aversion: Why, for example, does…