Does tort reform harm innovation?

The answer appears to be yes according to an NBER working paper by Galasso and Luo: We find that, on average, laws that limit the liability exposure of healthcare providers are associated with a significant reduction in medical device patenting and that the effect is predominantly driven by innovators located in the states passing the…

CRISPR as a diagnostic?

Innovation can occur various ways.  Consider the rapidly evolving area of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) Zika, meet CRISPR. …researchers have incorporated the gene-editing system CRISPR into a diagnostic test — one that can differentiate between two strains of the Zika virus. CRISPR has been hailed for its potential to fix mutations that cause disease.…

Innovation: The good and the bad

Our data, for example, show that a third of Medicare’s spending in physician or outpatient settings in 2012 reflects technology that did not exist a decade earlier…When it comes to technology development, the central challenge is to encourage high-value innovation while discouraging innovation that drives up costs without much improving health. Bagley, Chandra and Frakt. Correcting Signals for…

Why doesn’t evidence based medicine spread faster?

One reason is that physicians may value their own experiences (i.e., learning by doing) over the accumulated experience across many providers.  A paper by Berndt et al. (2015) look at physician prescribing patterns of antipsychotic.  They note that some physicians concentrate in prescribing specific antipsychotics and others concentrate on prescribing other ones. The authors claim the…