Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Value measurement using cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) is one of the core stables of health economic research. CEA often uses quality adjusted life years (QALYs) to capture how a treatment affects a patients mortality and morbidity. CEA makes explicit assumptions about the tradeoffs between mortality and morbidity by assuming these are additive. Further, this approach, however,…
The answer is not raw brain processing power, but rather it is our ability to learn from others. At least that is the argument from Joseph Henrich’s book The Secret of our Success. Slate Star Codex has an excellent book review. Consider the following graph comparing human, chimpanzee and orangutan intelligence. Another interesting quotation from…
According to a news report in The Globe and Mail, one of the primary reasons for falling life expectancy in Canada is the opioid epidemic. Life expectancy in Canada has stopped increasing for the first time in more than four decades, due largely to soaring overdose deaths in the Western provinces. In British Columbia, the…
Why have a physician do a job when a nurse could do it? Why have a nurse do it if a home health aide could do it? Clearly, the latter group in each sentence is lower cost; however, the former group may provide higher quality care. The balance of who can do what in terms…
The answer may be ‘yes’. Since immigrants make up a disproportionate share of health care workers–particularly for the elderly–restricting the number of immigrants may lower the quality and increase the cost of health care in the U.S. That is the finding of a recent study by Zallman et al. (2019) in Health Affairs: Using nationally…
HEOR in 2020: Gazing into the crystal ball. Self-assessed unmet need. Hospital consolidation and patient satisfaction. Which countries oppose WHO drug price transparency proposals? Is bundled payment the future?
Guest post by Mark Linthicum, Director of Scientific Communications at The Innovation and Value Initiative To get to Value Assessment 2.0, a concerted effort across fields of expertise is needed to improve methods and establish practical approaches that make sense in real-world decision making. The Innovation and Value Initiative’s Open-Source Value Project aims to catalyze…
At the American Psychiatric Association meeting last week, the APAM Center provided some suggestions. AJMC reports that their 5 policy recommendations include: Create action plan to insure network adequacy. “Employers can start by expanding services at the inpatient and outpatient levels, and engaging regional and national organizations to add providers, including specialty providers. They can…
This question is difficult to answer. In many countries with government provided health care, wait times are long. For the Veterans Affairs (VA) beneficiaries, this does not seem to be much of an issue according to a Penn et al. (2019) study covering wait times between 2014 and 2019: Although wait times in the VA…
Will mHealth save the NHS? Altruism and physician specialty choice. Children’s access to cancer drugs is >6 years behind adults. Interview with Ezekiel Emanual. Do economists need data visualizations?