Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Next month in San Diego, the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy is holding its annual conference. I am a co-author on two abstracts accepted as part of the conference. The first abstract won a platinum medal as one of the top 7 abstracts in the entire conference, the second abstract won a silver medal as well. The titles…
I am excited to announce that as of April 5, 2013, I will be joining the firm Precision Health Economics. PHE is a leading health care consulting company providing sophisticated quantitative analysis. More information on the firm is below: In 2005, a group of academic health economists from elite research universities founded Precision Health Economics…
The Healthcare Economist has a new report out for the Institute of Medicine. The report is co-authored with a number of outstanding individuals at Acumen including: Thomas MaCurdy, Jay Bhattacharya, Daniella Perlroth, Anita Au-Yeung, Hani Bashour, Camille Chicklis, Kennan Cronen, Brandy Lipton, Shahin Saneinejad, Elen Shrestha, and Sajid Zaidi. IOM summarizes the goals of the…
Medicare’s Hospital Compare website evaluates hospital quality. One of the most recent measures to be added to Hospital Compare is a measure of efficiency. The measure calculates a price-standardized, case-mix adjusted measure of spending during period before, during and after a hospital admission. The Healthcare Economist (Jason Shafrin) and a team at Acumen (including Tom…
How does Medicare adjust payments to physician practices to account for regional differences in input costs such as employee wages, office rent, malpractice insurance and other expenses? I recently co-authored a report in support of the CMS final rule which explains how CMS will make these adjustments for 2012. Among the key revisions are an…
My paper on how physician compensation affects surgery rates is being published in the May 2010 edition of Health Economics. The abstract from the article is below: “This paper employs a nationally representative, household-based dataset in order to test how the compensation method of both the specialists and the primary care providers affects surgery rates.…
Most women gain weight after marriage. However, this may not just be do to having a child. The New York Times reports on a recent study by Annette Dobson in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. They find that “[a]fter adjusting for other variables, the 10-year weight gain for an average 140-pound woman was 20…
A paper written by John Fontanesi and myself was recently published in the October 2009 edition of the American Journal of Managed Care. The paper is titled “Delivering Vaccines: A Case Study of the Distribution System of Vaccines for Children.” The abstract of the paper is below: Objective: To evaluate the efficacy of the central- ization…
Researches at UNC found that marriage may make you happy and healthy but fat as well. If you’ve been a loyal reader of the Healthcare Economist, however, you knew that already. Jason Shafrin’s research on marriage and weight gain already showed that marriage leads to increased weight gain. In fact, the research demonstrated that one…
This week I’ll be in Vancouver for the Western Economic Association International Conference. I’ll be presenting my paper on “Why Does Getting Married Make You Fat? Incentives and Appearance Maintenance.”