Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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…
According to a study Bovell-Ammon et al. (2021) in JAMA Open, the answer is ‘yes’. The authors use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), which tracks a nationally representative cohort of noninstitutionalized youths aged 15 to 22 years in 1979 through 2018. The authors used cumulative incidence function estimates to compare Blacks…
I have written previously about the need for distributional cost-effectiveness analysis (DCEA) which would increase the value of treatments who improve the health for individuals who currently have the worst expected quality-adjusted life expectancy (QALE). I’ve written about this in AJMC and Health Affairs among other places. One key question many individuals may have is…
That is one approach being explored in Philadelphia according to an article in Kaiser Health News. Using funding from Temple University, two Pennsylvania Medicaid health plans, and some grant funding, the Template University Health System: …launched a two-year program last year to help 25 homeless Medicaid patients who frequently use its emergency room and other…
One reason for worse health outcomes for racial minorities could be reduced access to pharmacies. However, how big a problem is pharmacy access? A recent Health Affairs paper by Guadamuz et al. (2021) uses 2007-2015 data from the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs (NCPDP) to identify pharmacies, which were then geocoded and linked to…