Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
This is the claim of a new article by Song and Giovannucci (2016) in JAMA, but I am skeptical. Here is why. The authors compare cancer incidence and mortality between a low and high risk group. They defined a patient as low risk based on not smoking, no or moderate alcohol use, BMI between 18.5…
Machine learning programs have made dramatic steps in recent years. For instance, AlphaGo beat a world champion Go player recently. Playing games is great, but can machine learning improve health care? Science Daily reports that machine learning algorithms may help improve cancer screening accuracy. Every state in the United States requires cancer cases to be…
You can find one of my recent papers measuring how well survival measures from clinical trials (i.e., overall survival, progression free survival, time to progression) translate into real-world survival outcomes in Current Medical Research and Opinion here. The abstract is below. Objective It is unclear how well different outcome measures in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) perform in…
Clinical progress against a disease as wily and dimly understood as cancer, DeVita argues, happens when doctors have the freedom to try unorthodox things—and he worries that we have lost sight of that fact. Excerpt from “Tough Medicine: A disturbing report from the front lines of the war on cancer” by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker.
From a recent N.Y. Times article on Vice President Joe Biden’s cancer “moonshoot”: The researchers pointed out that although genome sequencing seems to be rapidly transforming cancer research, a tiny fraction of cancer patients are having their tumors sequenced because most insurers, including Medicare, will not pay for the procedure. For a start, the group told…
NPR reports that the developing world that cancer rates are increasing in the developing world. In fact: The majority of cancer cases — 57 percent — now occur in low- and middle-income countries. And 65 percent of cancer deaths worldwide occur in these countries, according to an analysis by the American Cancer Society. But there’s…
NCCN recently released a new approach to measure the value of cancer medicines. The approach–known as Evidence Blocks–evaluates medications on 5 dimensions: Efficacy of regimens, Safety of regimens, Quality and quantity of evidence for regimens, Consistency of evidence for regimens, and Affordability of regimens. Each criteria is ranked on a 1 to 5 block scale.…
Find out at the CDC’s website. They have incidence information by cancer type and gender for all states between 1999 and 2012. Below is a sample chart you can produce with these data.
Tomorrow I will be presenting a poster on “How well do surrogate endpoints and overall survival endpoints in clinical trials predict real-world survival?”at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) conference. Below is the poster information if anyone wants to stop by. You can download the poster HERE. Session Title: Poster Session: Health Services Research and Quality…
One of my paper (along with co-authors Darius Lakdawalla, Claudio Lucarelli, Sean Nicholson, Zeba M. Khan and Tomas J. Philipson) was published at Health Affairs. The title of the study is: Quality-Adjusted Cost Of Care: A Meaningful Way To Measure Growth In Innovation Cost Versus The Value Of Health Gains. The abstract is below. Technology drives both…