Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Let’s say that you have an international clinical trial that shows a new drug (SuperDrug) perform better than the previous standard of care (OldDrug). Also assume that individuals with a specific comorbidity–let’s call it EF–respond less well to the SuperDrug treatment. If you live in a country where comorbidity EF is common, how well do…
Defining which cancer treatments are the “best” is not as easy as you think. At first glance, treatments that produce the largest survival gains should be considered best. Most cancer treatments come with serious side effects. Thus, new treatments that better improve survival may also increase the risk of adverse events (although in some cases–like…
Did you ever wonder what is is like having lung cancer? Or narcolepsy? What factors are most important to patients when receiving treatment for these diseases? The FDA is working to collect these answers to help guide their drug approval process. The FDA’s “Voice of the Patient” aims to “…more systematically gather patients’ perspectives…
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) claims that although cost-effectiveness is highly valued in its health technology appraisal process, it sates that there are other factors considered relevant. However, no explicit weight is assigned to these other factors. Do they matter? A paper by Dakin et al. (2015) tries to answer this question by looking…
Which treatments are better than others? Ideally, medicines that provide large health benefits and cost little will be preferred to those that offer little health benefits and/or cost a lot. In health economics, one way to systematically evaluate different treatments is the efficiency frontier. The efficiency frontier methodology is an extension of the standard approach…
The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) is poised to develop and oversee a vast portfolio of new comparative effectiveness research. For this endeavor to transform patient care, new evidence must be disseminated to clinicians and patients, understood and considered relevant, and used in the decisions that inform clinical care. According to a Health Affairs paper…
Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) aims to determine whether a drug or medical procedure’s are more cost-effective than alternative treatments and/or none at all. Although the U.S. is not known as a leader in CER research (in part because public health insurance bodies such as Medicare do not take CER evidence into account when making coverage…
As part of Health Reform, the government created the a center to study clinical effectiveness of different health treatments. This center, known as the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), “does not have the power to mandate or even endorse coverage rules or reimbursement for any particular treatment.” What leverage does the Institute have? Not too…