Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
One of the key benefits of the UK health system is that everyone has access to care. However, is care provided equally to all people? A paper by Matias et al. (2024) examines whether or not there are any inequalities in waiting times by socioeconomic status for women diagnosed with breast cancer in England and…
That is the title of my new paper in Annals of the American Thoracic Society with co-authors David Ost, Fabien Maldonado, Jaehong Kim , Moises Marin, Tony Amos, Deanna Hertz, Iftekhar Kalsekar, and Anil Vachani. The abstract is below. Rational: While previous studies have assessed the clinical or economic value of specific technologies, the economic…
Should payers cover a new oncology treatment targeting specific biomarkers across multiple tumor types? One the one hand, one could require a separate trial for each tumor type. While this would be convincing evidence, it also is very expensive to conduct clinical trials for every tumor type, particularly if treatment efficacy is homogenous across tumor…
Clinical trials are short, but the benefits of many drugs lasts months or even years beyond the duration of these trials. To quantify the full costs and benefits of a treatment over time (for instance as used for HTA purposes), one must extrapolate this clinical benefits. Commonly, this extrapolation is done using a parametric function…
That is the answer Caswell-Jin et al. (2024) aim to answer. The authors used 4 cancer mortality models within CISNET for this study: Model D (Dana-Farber Cancer Institute). Used to define a set of disease states and implemented analytic formulations to estimate the association of interventions on transitions between these states, as well as on…
A paper by Gupta and Akinyemiju (2024) uses SEER data to examine trends in age-adjusted cancer mortality between blacks and whites between 2000 and 2020. The authors find that: In 2000, the [age-adjusted mortality] rate was 251.7 per 100 000 population among Black individuals and 199.7 per 100 000 population among White individuals, decreasing to 166.8 per…
That is the title of a paper currently published (well, in pre-prints) at Value in Health. Co-authors include Jaehong Kim, Moises Marin MA, Sangeetha Ramsagar, Mark Lloyd Davies, Kyana Stewart, Iftekhar Kalsekar and Anil Vachani. The abstract is below: ObjectiveTo measure the value of increasing lung cancer screening rates for high-risk individuals and its impact…
According to a paper by Miljković et al. (2023), the answer is ‘no‘. The authors examine oncology treatments with FDA approvals between 2015 and 2020 and identify average wholesale prices from Redbook. Drugs were classified into three categories: (i) first approval of a new mechanism of action compound, (ii) next-in-class approval regardless the tumor type,…
That is the finding from a CDC report released this month. Mortality rates fell by 24% between 2001 and 2021. Specifically, the cancer death rate for youth ages 0–19 years was 2.75 per 100,000 in 2001, but decrease to 2.10 per 100,000 in 2021. The analysis uses data including (i) cause of death data from…
That is the finding from a Shih et al. (2023). Their first finding is that white bagging and brown bagging are not yet that common, with the exception of supportive care. However use of “bagging” does save money…for payers at least. Adjusted mean insurance payments PPPM [per patient per month] were statistically significantly lower for…