It’s been an honor to serve and learn as a member of the COVID-19 Sports and Society Working Group, co-chaired by ex-Obama healthcare head Andy Slavitt and the VP of Basketball Performance for NBA Minnesota Timberwolves Dr. Robby Sikka. The guys and I wrote down some key takeaways from the different COVID-19 prevention and testing…
Category: Policy
The Atlantic: People v. Cancer
People of lower socioeconomic status face higher cancer death rates than their counterparts. African American men suffer the highest cancer incidence rate of any racial or ethnic group. But these gaps in cancer care can be addressed through policy. What does the case of Medicaid expansion reveal about cancer disparities in America? And what will…
Do FDA alerts impact practice patterns?
Think about the last time you were forced to make a decision in the face of uncertainty. You may have been choosing which job offer to accept or whether to move from renting to buying a home. You probably weighed the tradeoffs and asked yourself whether it made sense to gather additional information or to…
How to lead a research team from #hackathon to plenary in 6 months
The Flatiron study is proof of principle that real world evidence can be used to examine and inform health policy interventions, said Zafar, who led a discussion of Adamson’s study at the ASCO plenary session.
Q&A
Adamson spoke with Matthew Ong, a reporter with The Cancer Letter Before 2019, Blythe Adamson, a senior quantitative scientist at Flatiron Health, had never attended an annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. In the shower, sometime in November 2018, Adamson came up with an idea for future research: “I think we should…
Press: ACA Medicaid expansion eliminated racial disparities in timely cancer treatment
This post has a summary of press coverage about results from a research study from Flatiron Health and Yale, following the Plenary Session presentation at ASCO 2019. We learned that Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansion was associated with reduction in racial disparity in timely treatment of advanced cancer. Results were reported in the The…
Incentivizing health-promoting behaviors
A new comprehensive landscape analysis of Medicaid health behavior incentive programs gathers together many challenges and potential solutions in the latest issue of Health Affairs. In 2017-2018 the team interviewed 80 key-informant stakeholders and searched the literature. The most common incentive type offered by programs was gift cards or vouchers, including cash, Visa gift cards, specific venue…
data|evidence|policy|practice
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.
Economic Impact of Comparative-Effectiveness Studies
@AcademyHealth #ARM2018 attendees: join me on Monday at 3:15 pm in room 605-606, where Anirban Basu will present our work in collaboration with the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to quantify the potential economic impact of the findings from comparative-effectiveness research studies. Goal Our goal was to understand the potential benefits of implementing comparative-effectiveness…
Progress in viral suppression shifts distribution of metrics in US states
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…