Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Academic health centers often have a glowing reputation among clinicians and the general public of being the best of the best. In many cases, simple analysis of the numbers does not seem to back this assertion up. Part of the reason is selection bias. Academic and community health centers do not treat the same types…
Nurse practitioner employment has nearly doubled between 2010 and 2017 according to Auerbach et al. (2020). If nurse practitioners can provide similar quality for some services at lower cost, nurse practitioners could save money. If nurse practitioners can help better leverage physician time for more complex services, and increase access to care, they may be…
Janet Currie has a nice review article (Currie 2020) in Health Economics covering this topic. She summarizes the literature as follows: In the past 20 years, there has been an explosion of research demonstrating that child health is an important form of human capital. Healthier children live longer and healthier lives, get more education, and…
According to a recent paper by Young, Gruca and Nelson (2020), the answer is ‘yes’. The authors use data from the Iowa Health Professions Inventory (IHPI) to measure the number of professionals in a given area, data from the US Census’ American Community Survey (ACS) to measure the number of individuals in a given area.…
The answer is ‘maybe’. Some are scarred by the distance between the hype and reality of electronic health records (EHR), which promised both improved efficiency for practices and superior patient health outcomes. In practice–especially in the short-turn–EMR resulted in a lot of both direct and data entry cost to practices with limited interoperability and modest…
Health care costs are high in the U.S., making up 17.9% of the U.S. economy. The Economist reports on recent key drivers of US health care cost…and the answer isn’t drugs. Mr Trump has correctly identified a big villain behind health-care cost inflation, and it is not Big Pharma. Hospitals account for over 30% of…
Are narrow networks a good thing? On the one hand, they may be able to reduce health insurance premiums if insurers can negotiate lower prices. On the other hand, narrow networks means less choice of providers for patients. An less well-understood question is how narrow networks affect health care costs and utilization. Empirically, broader networks…
One trend in recent years is how many hospitals are being purchased by large regional or national hospital chains. An April 2019 slide deck from the NIHCM Foundation shows this trend graphically. A paper by Hsieh and Rossi-Hansberg (2019) provide some aggregate data as well as a case study from the Boston area. Four decades…
An interesting article on the Marketplace Morning Report last week dives into the topic. Hundreds of nursing homes around the country have shut down leaving states to deal with what to do with people who need long term care…In Massachusetts, lawmakers have extended a $50 million lifeline to keep some nursing homes open. One nursing…
Many researchers complain that physicians often use treatments with little evidence to base these decisions. From off-label prescribing, to unstudied surgical procedures, physicians are often painted as cavalier practitioners who don’t read studies. For instance, Austin Frakt at Incidental Economist writes: The British Medical Journal sifted through the evidence for thousands of medical treatments to assess…