Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The answer may be yes. One of the big inpediments to value-based pricing of pharmaceuticals was that any discount given to any single organization based on outcomes needed to be reflected in the Medicaid price. Since outcomes are subject to random noise, there will inevitably be health plans that end up getting a low price due to worse than expected…
Monetizing your DNA. Government schools. Paging Dr. Google? Not anytime soon. WHO to set drug prices? Is CAR-T a bust? Are not?
Health technology assessments aim to evaluate the costs and benefits of various healthcare treatments and technology. Many organizations that conduct HTAs say they wish to incorporate the patient perspective. In practice, this does not happen often. When it does, there are a number of methodological complexities. How do you incorporate the patient perspective into HTA? A…
Kaiser’s family of website has some interesting posts of late. The Kaiser Family Foundation presents 10 Essential Facts about Medicare Prescription Drug Spending. They show the increasing price of U.S. prescription drugs spending over time. They also show that many patients with Medicare Part D, still bear a large share of prescription drug costs for…
What is the difference between a conjoint analysis and a discrete choice experiement? ISPOR’s guidelines provide some information. “Conjoint analysis” is a broad term that can be used to describe a range of stated-preference methods that have respondents rate, rank, or choose from among a set of experimentally controlled profiles consisting of multiple attributes with varying…
Alan Balch, PhD, discusses the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review’s (ICER’s) Value Assessment Framework tool that aims to provide stakeholders in healthcare with evidence to make more informed decisions regarding new cancer therapies. Dr Balch also considers limitations to the tool’s effectiveness. Plus, he even discusses why if we lived life using a strict…
Commuting and health. Should you trust flu shots? Is ICER the new NICE? Is a cure for Zika in the works? Are parents happier than non-parents? Value-based reimbursement in 2016. The evolution of immunotherapy cancer treatment.
There has been a lot of criticism of drug prices in the U.S. One person not included the chorus of critics is Bill Gates. In an interview with Bloomberg, he said: “The current system is better than most other systems one can imagine,” Gates said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “The drug companies are…
Prospect theory states that individuals view transactions relative to a fixed reference point. Individuals are risk averse for gains (i.e., they would prefer $10 for sure over a 50/50 of winning $0 or $20) but risk loving over losses (i.e., they would prefer a 50/50 ‘lottery’ of losing $0 or $20 over a sure loss of $10.…
In the future, will your recommended cancer treatment be decided by a computer? That is what IBM hopes with the launch of their Watson for Genomics project. CNET reports: Typically, finding the appropriate treatment for a specific patient means sequencing his or her genome — the complete DNA structure packed into a single cell —…