The future of mental health?

Nature has an interesting article on how mobile technology is being used to treat mental illness. Estimates suggest that about 29% of people will experience a mental disorder in their lifetime1. Data from the World Health Organization (WHO) show that many of those people — up to 55% in developed countries and 85% in developing…

How to improve measures of “value”

Organizations such as the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), Memorial Sloan Kettering and the American Society of Clinical Oncology all have begun producing value frameworks to determine if the value of new drugs are worth the cost.  An interesting Forbes Op-Ed by Anupam Jena and Tomas Philipson in Forbes examines whether these organizations are looking…

Are drug prices higher or lower in the U.S.

The high price of prescription drugs in the U.S. has received a lot of press in recent years.  However, are drug prices really higher in the U.S. than other countries?  Tomas Philipson makes an interesting point regarding U.S. drug prices: It is well known that free-market prices of branded drugs still on patent are higher in…

Value Framework Guidelines

In recent years, a number of organizations have developed value frameworks to assess new treatments.  These organizations include the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), Memorial Sloan Kettering Memorial Cancer Center (Drug Abacus), American Society for Clinical Oncologists (ASCO),  National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN), European Society of Medical Oncology (Magnitude of Clinical Benefit Scale).…

The Intuition behind Bayes Theorem

Bayes Theorem is well-known in law of probability. Mathematically, you could write it as: P(A|B)=P(A and B)/Pr(B) = P(B|A)*P(A)/P(B). An interesting interview in Scientific American with Decision theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky explains Bayes Theorem more intuitively. I might answer that Bayes’s Theorem is a kind of Second Law of Thermodynamics for cognition. If you obtain a…