Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
For any patients–but especially those with neurodevelopmental illnesses such as schizophrenia–have a consistent ‘medical home’ is vital for continuity of care. However, having consistent access to provider who know your medical history may be challenging if you frequently switch health insurance. “Insurance churn” is defined a patients who either transition between health plans or transition…
Below is the abstract for my most recent publication titled “Access to credible information on schizophrenia patients’ medication adherence by prescribers can change their treatment strategies: evidence from an online survey of providers“. It is work with Suepattra G May, Anshu Shrestha, Charles Ruetsch, Nicole Gerlanc, Felicia Forma, Ainslie Hatch, Darius N Lakdawalla, and Jean-Pierre Lindenmayer.…
A study titled “Patterns of Adherence to Oral Atypical Antipsychotics Among Patients Diagnosed with Schizophrenia” was just published in the November edition of JMCP. This is work with co-authors Joanna P. MacEwan, Felicia M. Forma, Jason Shafrin, Ainslie Hatch, Darius N. Lakdawalla, Jean-Pierre Lindenmayer. The abstract is below. Go check it out! BACKGROUND: Poor medication adherence…
Managed care, as the names suggests, aims to manage health care. The goal is to identify high quality, low cost treatments in order to insure that patients get the best care while keeping premiums low. While good in theory, managed care critics often contend that some of the stricter managed care policies reduce patient access…
Dr Dana Goldman, a USC professor and partner at my employer–Precision Health Economics–explains how restrictive prior authorization policies can adversely affect the care patients with schizophrenia receive.
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…
Do African Americans and Latinos receive the same quality care as Caucasians? This is the question asked by Horvitz-Lennon et al. (2014). Quality of Care Before one can answer this question, one first has to define what “quality care” means. The authors use the following definition for pharmacological indicators: Any use of antipsychotic drugs, Conditional on…