Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Efficacy describes the technical relationship between the technology and its effects (whether it actually works), whereas effectiveness concerns the extent to which application of an efficacious technology brings about desired effects (changes in diagnoses, altered management plans, improvement in health)…Efficiency is an economic concept which relates efficacy and effectivness to resource use. Assessment of efficiency is…
Your knee-jerk reaction (and mine) is No! However, an interesting article from Mosiac makes the case that the argument is not clean cut. Because it has long been considered unethical to include expectant mothers in clinical trials, scientists simply don’t know whether many common medicines are safe for pregnant women. Of the more than 600…
An concise article from Sean Khozin and Gideon Blumenthal (2015) try to explain. “Personalized (or precision) medicine has been broadly described as the administration of the right therapy to the right patient at the right dose and intensity.” However, this is a fairly broad definition. Some more concrete examples of personalized medicine include: Modern concepts in…
Courtesy of xkcd.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reviews and approves all drugs. But what criteria does the FDA use to evaluate new drugs? Namely that they are effective (i.e., improve health outcomes) and safe (i.e., have limited adverse health events). In a 2007 guidance document from the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) and…