Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Patient preferences should be the most important part of health care decisionmaking. However, third parties often make decisions for patients. Physicians make decisions for patients due to asymmetric information (i.e., physicians are experts; patients typically are not). Payers make decisions for patients since–in most developed countries–third-party payment cover most of the cost. Moreover, in some…
A paper by Meyer et al. (2020) has a nice summary of potential mechanisms through which the presence of COVID-19 could impact clinical trial results. What should a researcher do when a clinical trial is impacted by COVID-19? Here are some analysis considerations. The full article is interesting throughout.
That is the questioned answered in a paper by Mukherjee et al. (2023). The authors define an “HEOR study” for this paper as …real-world evidence studies that conducted a secondary/post-hoc analysis using randomized controlled trial (RCT) data, and a within-trial cost-utility analysis in which the outcome of interest was costs or PROs including preference-based utilities…
How do mental health issues impact the likelihood of food security? This question is difficult to answer empirically for (at a minimum) two primary reasons: Endogeneity/Unobserved factors. For instance, personal, family, and neighborhood characteristics (e.g., family stability, access to health care, exposure to violence) may impact both mental health and the likelihood of food insecurity.…
epidemic. noun an outbreak of disease that spreads quickly and affects many individuals at the same time : an outbreak of epidemic disease an outbreak or product of sudden rapid spread, growth, or development The opioid epidemic is one that has impact a large number of Americans. Data from 2019 shows that there were over…
Let’s say that you have an international clinical trial that shows a new drug (SuperDrug) perform better than the previous standard of care (OldDrug). Also assume that individuals with a specific comorbidity–let’s call it EF–respond less well to the SuperDrug treatment. If you live in a country where comorbidity EF is common, how well do…
A recent paper by Ben et al. (2023) provides an R tutorial for implementing economic evaluations–often cost effectiveness analyses–using data from clinical trials and analyzed using R. The article starts by providing a summaries of key issues researchers face when conducting these economic evaluations: Missing values. Missing data are common in clinical trials either due…
Yesterday it was announced that Claudia Goldin won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics (formerly the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel). She is the 3rd woman to have won the economics Nobel. The Nobel press release summarizes her research as follows: Women are vastly underrepresented in the global labour…
That is the title of an interesting review paper by Squires et al. 2023. The abstract is below: The effectiveness and cost of a public health intervention is dependent on complex human behaviors, yet health economic models typically make simplified assumptions about behavior, based on little theory or evidence. This paper reviews existing methods across…
Health care data–particularly spending data–often has a right skewed distribution with a high number of 0’s. For instance, US health care spending in 2019 was $11,852. However, many people don’t get sick and have no health care spending. Moreover, people generally don’t have negative health care spending. Further, some many patients with serious diseases rack…