Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
This is the title of a new paper I have out today at JMCP with co-authors Shanshan Wang, Jaehong Kim, Slaven Sikirica, and Alexander Sandhu with the subtitle “An economic model measuring the impact of sotagliflozin among patients with heart failure and diabetes“. The abstract is below: BACKGROUND: Heart failure (HF) is among the leading…
Check out my new publication with co-authors Suhail Thahir, Alexa Klimchak, Ivana Audhya, Lauren Sedita, and John Romley titled “Quantifying the Insurance Value for Rare Diseases: Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy” in AJMC. The abstract is below. Objectives: To quantify the magnitude of an ISPOR novel value element, insurance value, as applied to new treatments for a rare,…
Patients hate narrow networks. Anything that limits their choice of physicians or hospitals is disliked. Americans love more choice. Payers, on the other hand, like narrow networks because they save cost–through the ability to negotiate lower rates–and potentially increase quality–if the contracted network has higher quality physicians. In fact, according to the KFF Employer Health…
It makes sense that more educated individuals have lower mortality rates. Better education may improve health literacy. More education can lead to higher income and and more employee health benefits (with better insurance coverage). However, does living in communities with more educated individuals impact mortality separately from whether an individual’s family is highly educated? According…
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS’) Prescription Drug Consumer Price Index (CPI‐Rx) looks at price changes for drugs dispensed at outpatient retail pharmacies. However, many pharmaceuticals–especially infusions and injections–are administered at physician offices or hospitals. How would including physician-administered drugs impact the CPI-Rx? That is the question a paper by Hicks, Berndt and Frank (2024)…
The 340B Drug Pricing Program is a federal initiative designed to help certain healthcare providers, known as “covered entities,” stretch their resources to better serve vulnerable and underserved patient populations. Created in 1992, the program requires pharmaceutical manufacturers to sell outpatient drugs at significantly discounted prices (typically 25% to 50% off) to eligible hospitals, clinics,…
A paper by Drummond et al. (2023) examines how health technology assessment bodies deal with the challenge of value assessment for cell and gene therapies (also known as Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMPs) in Europe). To do this the authors: …undertook i) a targeted review of the literature on the clinical and economic evidence needs…
Gene editing without CRISPR? RCTs in economics. Claude and GTP4o on bias-adjusted nearest neighbor matching. Opioid prescriptions falling in workers comp. Since 2010, 149 rural hospitals have closed. Digital Health startups raise $1.1b in Q1 2024.
The good news: drug shortages in 2023 were down in the US from their recent peak between 2010 to 2012. The bad news: Drug shortages in 2023 were the highest they have been since 2012. These findings are from an FDA Report to Congress. Of note, shortages for biologic drugs (governed by CBER) increased a…
Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory posit that individuals have loss aversion. What is loss aversion? It means that individuals experience losses more intensely than gains of the same magnitude; for instance, the psychological impact of losing a certain amount of money is greater than the pleasure derived from gaining that same amount. A key question…