Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The year 2022 was a good, but perhaps not great year for innovation. According to the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research’s (CDER) New Drug Therapy Approvals 2022 report, there were 37 novel drugs approved in 2022. This number is down from the historical rate of approvals between 2013-2021 (43.4 approvals per year) and…
That is the question posed by Buntin et al. (2022). The authors used data from the 2007-2018 Medicare Master Beneficiary Summary File and then ran a regression adjustment to control for patient demographics (i.e., age, sex), number of chronic conditions (none, 1-3, ≥4), and whether the individual had Part A or Parts A and B…
A paper in Health Affairs by Martin, Hartman, Benson, Catlin, and The National Health Expenditure Accounts Team (2022) finds that national health expenditures (NHE) rose but declined as a share of gross domestic product (GDP). Health care spending in the US grew 2.7 percent to reach $4.3 trillion in 2021, a much slower rate than the increase…
A Health Affairs Forefront article by Johnson and Dieleman (2022) published last week using the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS’s) State Health Expenditure Accounts (SHEA) data. A previous study looked at these data through 2014, but the recent publication updates this analysis through 2019. The authors first use a age- and sex-standardized health…
That is the finding from a paper by Afoakwah et al. (2022) in JAMA Open. The authors use 2015-2019 data from the National Vital Statistics System, CDC WONDER, and the CDC’s Alcohol-Related Disease Impact (ARDI) Application for 58 alcohol-related causes of death. They find that: During the 2015-2019 study period, of 694 660 mean deaths…
Based on some recent reports, hospital finances in 2022 look poor. Government cash infusions from COVID-19 were helpful during the pandemic but have largely disappeared. At the same time, costs for labor and supplies have risen. Adding on to these financial pressures is the recent rise in the number of RSV cases. According to a…
…well, at least fewer people are dying from natural disasters. This is from a recent New York Times article.
The answer is provided in a recent white paper by Pearson, Schapiro and Pearson (2022). They use IQVIA data through 2020 across 389 drugs treating 1.8 million individuals. The study finds that while 5% of drugs with an orphan indication cost more than $500,000 per year, these drugs make up only 0.08% of all patients…
Private equity investments have grown in health care in recent years. According to Appelbaum and Batt (2020), whereas in only 4.7% of leveraged buy-outs (LBO) were in health care in 2000, that number had risen to 12.2% in 2019. A 2022 white paper finds that investments in health care have risen even more: The number…
A paper published earlier this year by the Antimicrobial Resistance Collaborators in The Lancet aims to quantify the size of the problem. The authors used a variety of data sources including systematic literature reviews, hospital system data, surveillance systems, and other sources. The authors estimated that these data covered 471 million individual records or isolates.…