Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The answer is ‘yes’, but the magnitude of these savings are relatively small and more than offset by additional OCM program costs. Keating et al. (2021) writes: In this exploratory difference-in-differences study of Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries with cancer undergoing chemotherapy (483 310 beneficiaries with 987 332 episodes treated at 201 OCM participating practices and 557 354 beneficiaries with…
What outcomes should be used to measure if a medicine is a “good” medicine? Improved survival? Improved ability to function? Few side effects? Ability to get back to work? Living to attend your daughter’s wedding? All of the above? Oftentimes, health economists measure value of a treatment for the average person. Preferences for efficacy, safety,…
That is the title of a paper I just published at Value in Health with Suepattra G. May, Lauren M. Zhao, Katalin Bognar, Yong Yuan, John R. Penrod, and John A. Romley. The subtitle is A Stated Preference Survey of Adults Diagnosed With and Without Lung Cancer. The full abstract is below: Objectives: To compare…
Last year, I published a paper that showed that cancer mortality rates fell by 24% between 2000 and 2016 and further that new cancer drugs accounted for saving 1.3 million lives in the US over that time period. At the end of the paper, we noted that these numbers may be conservative since the use…
That is the topic of a commentary I wrote with co-authors Joanna MacEwan and Farzad Ali, titled “Does COVID-19 Threaten the Progress Pharmaceuticals Have Made in Reducing Cancer Mortality Over the Last 20 Years?” An excerpt is below: Cancer mortality rates have fallen significantly over the last 20 years. Between 2000 and 2010, overall age-adjusted…
That is the finding from a recent paper by myself and co-authors Joanna MacEwan, Syvart Dennen, Rebecca Kee, Farzad Ali, and Katharine Batt. An excerpt from the paper is below: Between 2000 and 2016, deaths per 100,000 population across the 15 most common tumor types declined by 24%. Additionally, 10.2 new indications were approved per…
There is a large literature on this topic including fairly recent work from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment (see Finkelstein et al. (QJE 2012), Baicker et al. AER 2014, Finkelstein et al. JPE 2019). Many of these studies look at the population level; as the majority of people are healthy, the incremental benefit for health…
According to a paper by Stevens et al. (2020), the answer is ‘yes’. One clear reason why it would change is if the drug’s price changes. Even if that is not the case, however, the drug may be more or less effective over time. For instance, physicians may improve their ability to manage side effects…
This is the title of my recent commentary in the Journal of Clinical Pathways. The article discusses a number of challenges of measuring quality of care in oncology: The challenges mentioned included: the long time-lag to develop new guidelines and then incorporate these into validated quality measures, the potential narrow populations to which guidelines would…
Cancer is a horrible disease. Providing high quality care often means providing safe, effective and cost-effective treatments that meets a patient’s priority. Reaching these goals, however, is particularly challenging when treating older adults with cancer. A paper on this exact topic by Ramsdale et al. (2017) notes that: Cancer care delivery for older adults with…