Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the title of my recent piece in STAT News. Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration announced the creation of Project Facilitate. This pilot program facilitates access to innovative treatments for cancer that have not yet been approved by individuals who aren’t able to enroll in clinical trials. This move suggests that the…
An interesting paper from my colleagues at Precision in Medical Decision Making looks at how patients, physicians and nurses value different treatment attributes related to survival and treatment toxicity. The authors surveyed patients, oncologists, and oncology nurses using a combined conjoint analysis and discrete choice experiment survey approach. They found that: Virtually all patients preferred…
Why is the cost of cancer treatments growing so much in recent years? A new paper in the American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC) by my at Precision Health Economics colleague Jesse Sussell and co-authors (2019) has an explanation using data between 1997 and 2015 on cancer prices and the size of each treatment’s indicated…
Physician quality is often regarded by researhers as an immutable trait. There are high-quality physicians and low-quality physicians. In most areas where technical skill is required, however, practice makes perfect. A key question is, does ‘practice-makes-perfect’ (aka learning-by-doing) occur for physicians as well? A key challenge when doing this research is knowing the direction of…
Siegel et al. (2019) present a review of cancer incidence and mortality statistics in American over recent decades. Their key findings were: Over the past decade of data, the cancer incidence rate (2006‐2015) was stable in women and declined by approximately 2% per year in men, whereas the cancer death rate (2007‐2016) declined annually by…
The winners are James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo for research to treat cancer using the body’s own immune system. The Nobel Prize officially was “for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation.” The Wall Street Journal reports: The work of Drs. Allison and Honjo formed the backbone of new generations…
An interesting article from Longreads on dealing with a grandmother’s terminal illness in China. Guo Zhen didn’t know she had cancer, and my family had carefully devised a strategy to keep it that way. Doctors and nurses in the hospital had been instructed to never speak of her illness in her presence, and visitors to…
The Innovation and Value Initiative today announced that it is in the process of releasing a new model and value tool to evaluate treatments for for EGFR-positive non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). More details on the model (named the IVI-NSCLC model) are available here, which includes a study protocol and model timeline. Oncology is an…
It appears that the answer is ‘yes’. Many studies by the Dartmouth Atlas team have shown that regions that spend more on medical care do not always get better outcomes. However, a recent paper by my Precision Health Economics colleagues James Baumgardner, Ahva Shahabi, Mark Linthicum, Seanna Vine, and Darius Lakdawalla as well as Chris Zacker…
Let’s get this out of the way: both are clearly important. Within appropriate screening, patients don’t get the treatment they need. Further, delayed screening can make treatments less effective if the cancer has progressed or metastasized. On the other hand, without effective treatment, screening won’t have a major impact on patient outcomes. The question is,…