Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
A new study by Tai-Seale, McGuire, and Zhang (HSR 2007) analyzes how primary care physicians allocate their time in a typical office visit. The authors use data from 392 videotaped office visits conducted in three settings: 1) a salaried group practice in an academic medical center (AMC), 2) a managed care group (MCG), and a…
There is an interesting article from Sunday’s N. Y. Times magazine (“…what makes us healthy?“) about the problems in epidemiology of using non-randomized data to draw conclusions. For instance, there is much uncertainty as to whether hormone-replacement-therapy increases, decreases or has no effect on the probability a woman will have heart disease. The article talks…
“GlaxoSmithKline Plc and Novartis AG, two of the world’s biggest vaccine makers, may have bet on the wrong technology in the race to develop a better flu shot.” This is how a recent article (“…Bet Wrong…“) by John Lauerman of Bloomberg News begins. Helped by a $221 million grant from the U.S. government, Novartis is…
From The Economist (“Live fast, die young“): “Rock stars are famous for excess, and some pay the price. A new study suggests that they are up to three times more likely to die young than the rest of the population, mainly because of drug and alcohol abuse.” Click here to see a chart of the…
This is the question posed by a 2007 NBER working paper by Mary Beth Landrum, Kate A. Stewart, David M. Cutler. The authors use data from the National Long Term Care Survey (NLTCS) between 1994 and 1999. The data is panel in nature and has the benefit of combining Medicare administrative data with survey responses.…
Can video games be used to learn how to best plan for infectious disease pandemics? Time reports on how a World of Warcraft pandemic can be used by epidemiologists: [The] papers document the path of an unexpectedly virulent virtual disease called ‘Corrupted Blood,’ which swept through World of Warcraft’s online characters starting in September 2005.…
This questions seems very straightforward theoretically. If each appointment takes 20 minutes, then one should schedule patients at 8, 8:20 8:40, 9, etc. The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy! – Robert Burns In reality, however, this scheduling plan rarely…
The August 1st edition of JAMA has an interesting article which examines how exposure to war crimes affects individuals view about peaceful negotiations (“…War Crimes…“). The study takes place in the Acholi, Lango, and Teso subregions in northern Uganda. Since the late 1980s, many people in this area of Uganda experienced the bitter fighting between…
Accoding to a Canadian study, infants can tell the difference between two languages without hearing the spoken words. To read more on the study, see today’s Washington Post (“Babies Can Discern Languages…“). Según una investigación canadiense, los infantes se pueden distinguir entre dos idiomas sin oÃr las palabras en voz alta.  Para más información acerca…
Robin Hanson has spent the last week blogging on his Overcoming Bias website asking individuals to sign a petitions to redo the RAND Health Insurance Experiment (HIE). For those who do not know what the RAND HIE, Mr. Hanson has two posts (#1 and #2) describing the experiment. I agree with Mr. Hanson when he…