Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
As the COVID-19 pandemic struck, policymakers looked to researchers to both predict the future trend of the pandemic as well as examine how different policy options would impact society. Both epidemiologists and economists rose to the challenge, creating a variety of models to help inform policy decisions. How did the models developed by economists and…
At first glance, John Cochrane makes a compelling case that pay toilets should not be illegal. The absence of pay toilets is in fact a delightful encapsulation of so much that is wrong with American economic policy these days. Activists decide free toilets are a human right, and successfully campaign to ban pay toilets. For…
How do you evaluate treatment efficacy and safety outside of the clinical trial setting? This is not just a question of academic interest. In last week’s JAMA, Rubin 2021 writes about some of the challenges of evaluating COVID-19 vaccines outside of a clinical trial setting. In an interesting, two-day workshop last week, the Duke Margolis…
Is your observational research study following best practices? Is your methodology transparent? To help answer these questions, the Enhancing the QUAlity and Transparency Of health Research (EQUATOR) Network created the STROBE guidelines. The STROBE guidelines–an acronym for The Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology–aim to improve the transparency of the methods behind observational…
Population-adjusted indirect comparisons (PAICs) include both matching-adjusted indirect comparisons (MAICs) and Simulated treatment comparisons (STCs). The key data requirement for these methods is that they have individual patient data (IPD) from at least one clinical trial. This means the methods are most useful for studied funded by the clinical trial sponsor or when IPD clinical…
Understanding trends in COVID-19 transmission rates is vital both public health monitoring and policymaking decisions. However, diagnostic capacity may be limited, and test sampling is often non-random, and often COVID-19 cases are not reported when patients have mild or asymptomatic disease. What is the solution? A paper in Nature Biotechnology argues that wastewater testing may…