Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
What everyone wants is getting new, innovative medicines to market quickly, but at the same time insuring we have enough data to confirm that these medicines are safe and effective. How do we balance these two aims? A paper by Ollendorf et al. (2024) provides some guidance. Some of their suggestions are summarized below. Make…
When people are having a mental health crisis, what are their options? Many patients may need to go to the emergency department (ED). An alternative to the ED is behavioral health crisis care (BHCC),defined as emergency behavioral health services available on a 24/7 walk-in basis to all patients, regardless of ability to pay. BHCC typically…
One of the goals of cost sharing (e.g., copayments, deductibles) is to decrease moral hazard. In other words, if a good is free (or lower cost), you’ll consume more of it than if you had to pay for all of it out-of-pocket. One challenge in health care ours that prices are not transparent. How much…
Contingent valuation is a survey-based economic method used to estimate the value of goods or services (often non-market goods) such as environmental benefits or public goods. The approach works by asking individuals to state their willingness to pay (WTP) for specific services or their willingness to accept (WTA) compensation for their loss. This method is…
Perhaps not. At least that is according to a paper by Anderson et al. (2024). The authors use a difference-in-difference approach with 2018-2021 claims data. A summary of the results are below. Approximately one-quarter of patients who use insulin report underuse because of cost. In response, more than twenty states have implemented monthly caps on…
Clinical trials are short, but the benefits of many drugs lasts months or even years beyond the duration of these trials. To quantify the full costs and benefits of a treatment over time (for instance as used for HTA purposes), one must extrapolate this clinical benefits. Commonly, this extrapolation is done using a parametric function…
This is a common question I receive, often with the implicit assumption that prices in the US are too high. One key question to consider is, what are we trying to optimize? Tyler Cowen has a very good and brief post talking about drug prices and makes the case that (i) the supply of new…
Sometimes I hear tech people saying they are building machines that think like people. Then I report this ambition to neuroscientists and their response is: That would be a neat trick, because we don’t know how people think. David Brooks, “Many People Fear A.I.: They Shouldn’t” NY Times.
Are wealthier people healthier? If so, how strong is this relationship? Does it vary across countries? That is what a paper by Kyriopoulos et al. 2024 aims to answer. They measure health and wealth using a “concentration index” (CI) which is calculated as follows: CI is estimated with reference to the concentration curve, which illustrates…
That is the title of a great review paper by Salah Ghabri, Dalia Dawoud and Michael Drummond. They discuss that guidance on the incorporation of adverse events (AEs) into economic models has not been standardized. Nevertheless, this paper provides helpful guidance. Specifically, the paper explores: (1) the incorporation of AEs in economic decision models, (2)…