PREFER recommendations for patient preference studies

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…

How do HEOR studies handle missing data?

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…

Impact of mental health on food security

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.…

The opioid epidemic

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…

Trial-Based Economic Evaluations in R

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…

Claudia Goldin wins Nobel Prize in Economics

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…

The long-term effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of public health interventions; how can we model behavior?

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…

Addressing 0 values with econometrics

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…