Category: Uncategorized

Workers Comp total drug spend: $2.9 billion. Will AI increase or decrease firm size? Complex systems models for public health. For-profit hospice saves money. RCT: AI vs. human in and cardiac function assessment.

Nobody in this world can tell me what to think, but I think everybody has a lesson to teach me. Lex Fridman.

Medical marijuana in Mississippi. Diagnosis and behavioral change. Senators call on CMS to fully cover amyloid-targeted Alzheimer’s drugs. $5.8m penalty for PBM in Massachusetts. Value through the lens of Patients’ Well-Being.

Most health technology assessment (HTA) bodies measure treatment value as benefits from reduced patient morbidity and mortality and weigh these health gains against incremental changes in treatment cost. The limitation of this approach, however, is that it may ignore broader societal value. For instance, if patients have improved functional status, caregiver time and cost burden…

The book The Right Price: A Value-Based Prescription for Drug Costs is a fantastic book for individuals interested in understanding why value-based drug pricing makes sense. It is a bit more technical and more detailed than the average health policy book, but there are few formulas or detailed methodological explanations. Rather, the book provides a…

Do male physicians earn more than females? And if so, by how much? This is the question posed by a recent paper by Whaley et al. (2021). The authors use data from Doximity, an online professional network for physicians. Doximity includes information for more than 70% of US physicians, including data partnerships with National Plan…

A white paper from Cannon and Pohida (2021) calls for applying “public option principles” to Medicare. Who would have thought that the Cato Institute would call for a public option? Well in fact, the do not really call for a public option. The proposal should be called introducing a voucher system into Medicare. Under the…

This is what a study by Whaley et al. (2021) aims to find out. Many employers have introduced rewards programs as a new benefit design in which employees are paid $25–$500 if they receive care from lower-priced providers. Our goal was to assess the impact of the rewards program on procedure prices and choice of…

Traditional cost-effectiveness measures measures treatment value based on how it affects your health. Health is often decomposed into longevity (i.e., survival) and quality of life while alive. However, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen argued that improvements in one’s life should be based on capabilities (a.k.a. opportunities, freedoms, advantages) to perform desired tasks rather than more abstract…