Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
There are many studies that show that social determinants of health (SDOH) impact health outcomes. A more challenging question is how do SDOH impact health outcomes? Specifically, through what pathways or mechanisms do SDOH operate? A paper by Thimm-Kaiser (2023) identifies 8 mechanisms through which SDOH impact outcomes. These include: SDOH are underlying causes of…
That is the question a paper by Anirban Basu (2023) in Science Advances attempts to answer. A key assumption the article makes is that race is a social and not a biological construct. Basu justifies this assumption by stating that “the vast majority of genetic variation associated with race-specific traits exists within racial groups and…
A paper by Saulsberry et al. (2023) argues that the Social Vulnerability Metric (SVM) is an improvement over previous social determinants of health (SDOH) measures such as the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI). SVI uses census tract level data to construct overall community rankings based on variables included in four themes: “Socioeconomic Status” including percentages below…
An interesting study from Masters et al. (2023): Induction of labor (IOL) rates in the United States have nearly tripled since 1990. We examine official U.S. birth records to document increases in states’ IOL rates among pregnancies to Black, Latina, and White women. We test if the increases are associated with changes in demographic characteristics…
A paper by Caraballo et al. (2023) published today uses CDC data to measure excess mortality among Black Americans between 1999-2020. They find that: From 1999 to 2011, the age-adjusted excess mortality rate declined from 404 to 211 excess deaths per 100 000 individuals among Black males (P for trend <.001). However, the rate plateaued from…
ICER recently released a white paper titled “Advancing Health Technology Assessment Methods that Support Health Equity“. In addition to discussing a variety of methods–e.g., distributional cost-effectiveness analysis (DCEA), extended cost effectiveness analysis, multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA)–for quantifying the value of new treatments in terms of their ability to reduce health disparities, ICER also introduces the…
The Yost Index is a measure of socioeconomic status (SES) across geographic areas. The index was developed by Kathleen Yost and coauthors in their 2001 paper titled “Socioeconomic status and breast cancer incidence in California for different race/ethnic groups.” There are seven key inputs to creating the Yost index were calculated at the Census block…
In recent years, policymakers and payers have been focused increasingly not only on how new health technologies improve overall health, but also whether they can reduce health disparities. Oftentimes, however, discussions around health disparities are conducted on a qualitative basis with litlted quantitative analysis of tradeoffs between equity and effectiveness. Distributional cost effectiveness analysis (DCEA)…
One of President Biden’s top priorities is reducing health disparities. In fact, President Biden created a Health Equity Task Force to address the issue; the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have created their own Framework for Health Equity 2022–2032. The 5 priories in this CMS Framework are: Expand the collection, reporting, and analysis…
Will telehealth widen or reduce health disparities? Telehealth may make it easier for individuals who lack transportation to get access to medical care; on the other hand, those without high-speed internet or good cell phone connections could be disadvantaged. In a recent report, NCQA examined the future of telehealth and examined how to make sure…