Want to join our book club? We’re reading the new Causal Inference Book by Miguel Hernan and James Robins. The book is forthcoming publication by Chapman & Hall/CRC and it is available for FREE right now to download from Harvard. Every few weeks my colleagues and I meet up to discuss a few chapters. We…
In this tutorial, you’ll gain access to the R code, dataset, and motivation to replicate data visualizations in my latest paper and apply the concepts to your next one. I sat on an airplane last year, flipping through The Economist, when I froze at the sight of a tiny chart littered with a mess of…
Our new study on the rise of immunotherapy drugs at the end of life with bladder cancer learned from real-world patients by using @flatironhealth curated EHR data. We hypothesized that advanced urothelial cancer patients would increasingly receive checkpoint inhibitors near the end of life, as they tend to have more favorable side effect profiles…
The need to use more reproducible tools in health economics and outcomes research is growing rapidly as analyses of real-world data become more frequent, involve larger datasets and employ more complex computations.
The Irish Department of Health (DoH) is in the process of developing a national biosimilar medicines policy which aims to increase biosimilar use by creating a robust framework where biologicals and biosimilars can be used safely, cost-effectively, and confidently in the health service. In this example from an Irish teaching hospital, the introduction of the biosimilar first to new patients, along with a switching study executed in parallel, helped to raise prescriber confidence.
While preparing a review for the journal Current HIV/AIDS Reports, I uncovered some interesting longitudinal trends in the care cascade and heterogeneity in the progress of US states. The following visualizations describe CDC HIV surveillance data from 2010-2014. They didn’t make the cut for our review paper, and they are too beautiful and interesting to…
Failure to consider these methods could result in unintended consequences and exacerbate existing inequalities in health between patients who are “average” and “outliers.”
Lately I’ve been exploring trends in utilization of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis. Data from Google Trends shows a spike in the number of searches for “emtriciabine/tenofovir” when the FDA approved its use for HIV prevention in addition to treatment. More general searches for HIV PrEP are increasing at a rate that looks very similar to the…
Digging through the Medicaid Prescription Drug Database, I want to find out if HIV drug prices are rising faster over time compared to other daily medications for chronic diseases. I stratified by the number of drugs in each combination tablet, and next I will need to adjust for inflation. Let me know if you think of…