AMCP Nexus Poster: Adherence Patterns for Oral Atypical Antipsychotics in Patients Diagnosed with Schizophrenia

If you are attending AMCP Nexus in October, I am a co-author on a poster presentation titled “Adherence Patterns for Oral Atypical Antipsychotics in Patients Diagnosed with Schizophrenia” co-authored with Joanna MacEwan, Felicia Forma, Ainslie Hatch and Darius Lakdawalla.  The presentation abstract is below and here.   BACKGROUND: Many payers rely on claims-based metrics—such as those…

Quality measurement: Where are we?

Leaders from two of the nations top quality organization–Christine Kassel from NQF and Rick Kronick from AHRQ–weigh in on the topic.  In a recent JAMA article, they first note some concerns: These concerns were underscored by the recent Institute of Medicine report on core metrics for health and healthcare progress,which noted the need to align…

Quotation of the Day

There are two ways to get richer: one is to make more money; and the second is to discover that more of the things we could love are already to hand (thanks to the miracles of the Industrial Revolution). We are, astonishingly, already a good deal richer than we are encouraged to think we are.…

What influences NICE decisions?

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…

Falsification Test for Instrumental Variables

Should instrumental variables (IV) be used for real-world evaluation of the comparative effectiveness of different studies?  It depends on who you ask.Garabedian et al. (2014) state Although no observational method can completely eliminate confounding, we recommend against treating instrumental variable analysis as a solution to the inherent biases in observational CER studies. On the other hand, Glymour,…

Selection on Moral Hazard

The terms adverse selection and moral hazard are well known within the field of health economics.  But what is “selection on moral hazard”?  Amy Finkelstein explains using the following analogy: In the context of an all-you-can eat restaurant, traditional selection is that people with big appetites are more likely to go to all-you-can-eat restaurants.  Selection…