Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
How do you design a good clinical trial? Clearly, the trial design depends on what question you are answering. For instance consider the dichotomy between an explanatory and pragmatic trial: A pragmatic randomised trial is undertaken in the “real world” and with usual care and is intended to help support a decision on whether to…
How long do sick kids in low-income countries get to spent with their physician at a doctor’s visit? A paper by Kruk et al. (2018) surveys health facilities in Haiti, Kenya, Malawi, Namibia, Nepal, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda to find out. The answer is that patient’s do not get much time at all. The median…
Often times, researchers want to measure the effect of certain interventions in the real-world. Doing this in practice is often difficult. For instance, consider measuring health outcomes among individuals who visit doctors compared to those who don’t. Inevitably, individuals who visit doctors will have worse outcomes. Why? Are doctors killing patients? This is clearly a…
Is statistics taking over journalism? Regression to the mean in the MLB. Use of real-world evidence to measures NSCLC treatment effectiveness. Mental healthcare wait times adversely affect patient outcomes. Using cancer cells to kill cancer. Amazon to fill your Rx as you leave the hospital? Health plan won’t pay your ER bill…or will they? VBID…
According to one study by Martin Anderson presented at the NBER’s Program on Health Economics meeting May 4, the answer is yes. Dr. Anderson examines the changes in insurance coverage, health care utilization, and mortality after the expansion of Medicare coverage to all patients with end stage renal disease (ESRD). The study finds that: …the expansions…
The government strictly regulates what information that pharmaceutical firms can share with payers. There is good reason for this. We don’t want drug companies making false claims that a drug can treat/cure a disease when there is no evidence to support that claim. Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of clinical evidence and studies…
While that may not be his intention, a study from Robert Wood Johnson has found that few carriers are leaving the market in 2019 and in fact there is likely to be a net increase in the number of health plans offered. Favorable financial results for participating carriers is clearly the motivating factor, along with…
Physicians as debt collectors. U.S. health care administrative costs. Cross-subsidies. A small donation. Most feared CEO in health care.
With co-authors Katalin Bognar, Michelle Brauer, Lauren Zhao, Rick Hockett, Michael O’Neil and Anupam Jena, I am excited to announce that our study “The potential value of rapid, cloud-enabled onsite testing for the diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis in the United States” was published in the Journal of Medical Economics today. The full abstract is below. …
What happens when you have missing data? Many people recommend using multiple imputation (see Briggs et al. 2003; Faria et al. 2014; Gomes et al. 2013; Hunter et al., 2015; Hughes et al., 2016). This approach, however, generally assumes that data are missing at random. Missing at random could be interpreted as the probability that health…