Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the finding from Daysal et al. (2025). We reproduce the results from an RCT showing the life-saving benefits of radiotherapy. We show radiation therapy also has economic returns: Ten years after diagnosis, treatment increases employment by 37 percent and earnings by 45 percent. Previous work has documented a substantial employment drop after a…
That is the title of a paper published today in Future Oncology with co-authors Erin Mulvey, Kyi-Sin Than, Sanjana Muthukrishnan, Alex Mutebi, Anindit Chhibber, Anthony Wang, Abualbishr Alshreef, Diala Harb, Victor Gonzalez, Sarah Quinlan, Vardhaman Patel and Patrick Connor Johnson. The study was conducted in collaboration with the Lymphoma Research Foundation. The abstract is below:…
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and most private payers in the U.S. have accepted the NCCN guidelines as a mandated reference to determine payment for “off‐label” use of anticancer drugs that are not approved for the specific indication by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Thus, a key question is what types of…
The answer appears to be ‘yes’ according a recent paper written by Uchechukwu Love Anyaduba, Oluwatosin Qawiyy Orababa, Zion Faye, Nazia Rashid, Gregory Reardon and myself. The abstract is below: BackgroundCancer trials increasingly use surrogate endpoints, but it is unclear how well recurrence-free survival (RFS) or disease-free survival (DFS) specifically predict overall survival (OS) in…
Today, the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network released a report titled “Out of Pocket Costs for Follow-Up Tests After Abnormal Screening Mammogram and Their Impact on Breast Cancer Survival.” The empirical analysis was conducted by myself and some colleagues at FTI Consulting (Shanshan Wang, Shurui Zhang, Citseko Staples Miller, and Sophia Mildred Setterberg). An…
One of the key benefits of the UK health system is that everyone has access to care. However, is care provided equally to all people? A paper by Matias et al. (2024) examines whether or not there are any inequalities in waiting times by socioeconomic status for women diagnosed with breast cancer in England and…
Should payers cover a new oncology treatment targeting specific biomarkers across multiple tumor types? One the one hand, one could require a separate trial for each tumor type. While this would be convincing evidence, it also is very expensive to conduct clinical trials for every tumor type, particularly if treatment efficacy is homogenous across tumor…
That is the topic from a recent study by Hayes et al. (2024): Payments for some diagnostic scans undertaken in outpatient settings were unbundled from Diagnosis Related Group based payments in England in April 2013 to address under-provision. Unbundled scans attracted additional payments of between £45 and £748 directly following the reform. We examined the…
A paper by Gupta and Akinyemiju (2024) uses SEER data to examine trends in age-adjusted cancer mortality between blacks and whites between 2000 and 2020. The authors find that: In 2000, the [age-adjusted mortality] rate was 251.7 per 100 000 population among Black individuals and 199.7 per 100 000 population among White individuals, decreasing to 166.8 per…
According to a paper by Miljković et al. (2023), the answer is ‘no‘. The authors examine oncology treatments with FDA approvals between 2015 and 2020 and identify average wholesale prices from Redbook. Drugs were classified into three categories: (i) first approval of a new mechanism of action compound, (ii) next-in-class approval regardless the tumor type,…