Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Many researchers complain that physicians often use treatments with little evidence to base these decisions. From off-label prescribing, to unstudied surgical procedures, physicians are often painted as cavalier practitioners who don’t read studies. For instance, Austin Frakt at Incidental Economist writes: The British Medical Journal sifted through the evidence for thousands of medical treatments to assess…
The National Cancer Institute defines personalized medicine as “uses information about a person’s genes, proteins, and environment to prevent, diagnose, and treat disease”. In practice, however, patient treatment is rarely personalized by individual since evidence to support complete personalization is rarely available. Personalization in practice more often means care that varies with some individual characteristics.…
A paper by Rothman et al. (2017) explains what goes on at the Washington Health Technology Assessment Program’s (WHTAP), the first state-administered health technology assessment (HTA) program in the U.S.: Over the past 9 years, Washington State has been pursuing an innovative and generally effective program to use evidence-based medicine to determine state health care…
Many policy experts have been proponents of value-based cost sharing. Under value-based cost sharing, medical care that is seen to provide a higher marginal benefit to the patient will have lower coinsurance rates than medical care with lower marginal benefits. If value-based cost sharing would be implemented, preventive care should have low coinsurance rates because…