Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
This week, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) and National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) released a document titled Evidence standards framework for digital health technologies. An accompanying piece in The Lancet by Greaves et al. (2018) aims to describe the goals of the document at a high level. The authors state that key…
Darius Lakdawalla has an very interesting review article in the Journal of Economic Literature on the Economics of the pharmacuetical industry. Do read the whole thing, but below I have listed some highlights. A model of firm R&D decisions Lakdawalla uses a simple model based on Nordhaus (1969) to derive some important implications about pharmaceutical…
The government strictly regulates what information that pharmaceutical firms can share with payers. There is good reason for this. We don’t want drug companies making false claims that a drug can treat/cure a disease when there is no evidence to support that claim. Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of clinical evidence and studies…
How frequently are pharmaceuticals used off label? Perhaps more than you think. Although these figures are a bit dated, Tabarrok (2000) details the extent of off-label prescribing in the U.S. as follows: According to a study by the U.S. General Accounting Office, 56 percent of cancer patients have been given non-FDA-approved prescriptions, and 33 percent…
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…
An interesting paper from some of my colleagues at Precision Health Economics: Approval of new drugs is increasingly reliant on “surrogate endpoints,” which correlate with but imperfectly predict clinical benefits. Proponents argue surrogate endpoints allow for faster approval, but critics charge they provide inadequate evidence. We develop an economic framework that addresses the value of…
I have an article up at the Washington Post‘s In Theory blog titled How we should pay for cures, according to economics. Imagine a major medical breakthrough: a cure for Alzheimer’s. Imagine that cure not only would improve the cognitive abilities of the more than 5 million Americans living with Alzheimer’s but also would give these patients…
Typically, the FDA evaluates drugs and devices based on whether they are safe and effective. Patient treatment preferences play little to no role in whether a drug or device is approved by the FDA. However, times are a changing. On Wednesday, the FDA released draft guidance whereby they recommend the inclusion of patient preference information…
One of the ways health plans in the health insurance exchanges have been able to keep premiums down is through offering beneficiaries very narrow networks. By steering patients towards “efficient” doctors, premiums stay low. However, patients may worry that these “low cost” doctors are lower quality than those outside of the network. The tradeoff between…
Right now, the answer is no, but in the near future, this may no longer be the case. The FDA has released a draft guidance on how it will regulate the new generation of wearable technology. This guidance says it will not regulate “general wellness” products like the FitBit. However, if the wearable cites health benefits for…